American Triangle
by Kat1
Summary: She couldn't run forever. History finally catches up with Sydney and forces her to make some tough decisions. Now with *Epilogue*
1. Run

Title: "American Triangle"  
  
Part 1: Run  
  
Author: Kat  
  
Important Notes: I am European, therefore I will spell my words in the European way. This story is Alternate Universe due to a few diversions from canon that will become clear as you read the story, but that was mainly because -- being European -- I haven't watched episodes I know so much about.  
  
Summary: She couldn't hold out forever. History finally catches up with Sydney, and forces her to make some tough decisions.  
  
Pairing: this first part has strong elements of Syd/Will -- but will become more Syd/Vaughn as it goes on. The title is an allusion to the emotional mess of the three characters, rather than some clever plot point.  
  
Rating: R due to frequent strong language, allusion to sex and some violence.  
  
Disclaimer: J.J.Abrams is my new best friend. No infringement intended to ABC or Touchstone. No money made by this endeavour.  
  
Date: 20th February 2002  
  
Distribution: Please ask.  
  
Feedback: Coveted and warmly regarded. My first Alias effort.  
  
**  
  
[The First Beginning]  
  
It was stupid. Henta was a small place some forty miles north of San Francisco. Mostly, it was a beachfront housing development peopled by divorcees fleeing the West Coast's bigger centres. The aura was generally relaxed -- Sydney had first witnessed topless sunbathing here -- yet the residents were wise enough not to market themselves as exponents of 'down home charm.' Cars were European, rather than Japanese. The population was mostly local and as such the main street was filled with hardware stores and first floor hairdressers. Almost unique within the state of California, there was no Starbucks.  
  
She was fourteen the first time. Fourteen. A huge poster of Patrick Swayze from 'Dirty Dancing' had covered her back wall and she'd just made the track team. Crucially, the darkish, shapeless mole beneath her left breast had been declared safe and her dark hair had warmed a little in the heat. The low-slung jeans her mother had approved last year raised eye- brows from the Jenkinson twins as she strolled down the block. The once innocent crop-tops now pulled at her breasts and the multi-coloured slash v- necks of her everyday hinted at womanhood, sexual education and the nights she let Chris Stephens drive her home. Fourteen was walking with her shoulders back, crying in the bathroom and buying underwear with lace.  
  
That summer, her father had rented a box-like mini-van with half a paint job and a radio only capable of picking up short-wave crank calls, and distressing 9-11s. They'd driven for hours out of LA and Sydney can't remember a time she was happier. Her father had taken off his jacket and rolled up his shirt sleeves. He'd even kissed her mother at a gas station when she'd remarked on the attractiveness of the attendant, mumbling, "oh no you don't," as his lips touched her neck.  
  
She wonders why she comes back. That holiday had been a bust. Her father had spent three days inside their condo sweating into his Hugo Boss suits and shouting down the telephone. Her mother had suffered painful migraines from the heat and had dyed her hair an odd shade, making Sydney a little embarrassed to walk down the street with her. Her dad wouldn't come to dinner, nor would he take them to his old fishing spot like he'd promised. Worst of all, he'd hidden a bottle of whiskey in the spare tyre hatch of the van. Consequently, the only time he'd move from the master bedroom, and the telephone, was to cool another tray of ice to serve with his malt. To punish him, she'd developed a system of clever rebuttals and slight reprimands. She'd ceased to smile at his dour half jokes and make apologies for him when her mother asked how they were "gettin' along." Mostly, she just spent a lot of time outside. And as a result, what was outside spent a lot of time brewing in her.  
  
Sure enough by the third day there was a boy. Flirtacious glances at the retro ice cream parlour had progressed into something else entirely. Hand holding, a start, had evolved into chaste kisses practised and perfected in sand dunes before a strange dialogue ("You know, in France, they do a different sort of kissing,") and afternoons of experimentation and giggles. The boy had a name but that was unimportant next to the taste of him, the feel of him. He spoke like her but drawled his words a little. The blonde streak down the centre of his hair was peroxide, unnatural. He was in High School. He was exotic, seeming to know things she hadn't even though about. He hated his father too. The next semester when she read an article in YM called, "Giving it up," it was him she thought about. For an extra summer and a fall there were even intermittent phone calls. He was her first love, and she was cruelly ripped away from him.  
  
All things considered, maybe the boy was the beginning of a pattern.  
  
By the fifth day, it became clear why they were all there; mom, dad and Syd. It was a concealment, a hideout. A rouse of a family holiday, a game. By the fifth day whatever he had done had passed, the cause of her father's run to the hills was over. He could go back.  
  
And he would go back.  
  
At the time Sydney entertained notions of an interest rate fall or a last minute merger saving her father's business (there was not a thought of spies, not then), but whatever the cause there had definitely been a shifting of positions, a realignment. She saw a half empty scotch bottle in the trash and the smell of burning paper (probably confidential files) lingered on the porch. It was over, and ended with him striding through the door, briefcase in hand, not even pausing to consider the feelings of his family.  
  
A lasting image, possibly. Certainly, a view of him that was to prove hard to forget.  
  
Knowing what she does now, knowing all the little truths, or more accurately being conscious of the bigger lies, it could just as easily have been her mother hiding, her mother authorising his return, her mother's oddly dyed hair the product of some unsuccessful mission. All she knows is that's it's hard to forgive her father for all the perceived wrongs he inflicted, all that she thought he did.  
  
Still. He made her leave. His hiding was done. So there was a neat irony to Sydney's return. Yes, it was stupid, overtly un-textbook, but there was something complete about hiding in Henta, with a boy by her side, wearing those low slung jeans again.  
  
Except this time there would be no going back.  
  
No going back, ever.  
  
**  
  
[The Second Beginning]  
  
It was wrong for her to have brought him. It was one of those, "shoulda known better," calls that made her arms ache and her head spin.  
  
She consoled herself by arguing that she didn't have any choice, she had to bring him or face worse consequences.  
  
For a start, he'd been there when she hit her apartment to collect her belongings. Had she lied to him while broken and bleeding he probably would have followed her -- worse -- phone her father and suggested they both follow her. Worse still, call out the APB on all stations and believe them when they said she'd died of 'natural causes.'  
  
Second, he was infectious, kinda strong. Almost a necessity. A scruffy, nasal, necessity who made her feel normal. He grinned at all the right places, all the right times. Not to mention she sort of loved him when he bent his head down, wrapped his hands around the back of his neck and exhaled long and loud. It was like an atonement for everything he should have done better. Sydney could relate to that.  
  
Without him, worse case scenario she could have ended up going insane. She has this feeling that she would be a very dangerous crazy woman. Very dangerous.  
  
Of course, he'd jumped at the idea of the trip. Jumped literally, that is. Jumped so hard that when he landed he didn't even try to conceal it, just smiled again and said, "Yeah so when?" before stuffing his hands nervously into his pockets.  
  
"Now," she'd said. "Right now."  
  
For nostalgia's sake, she'd rented a van. A big, air-conditioned van that smelled strongly of pine and was big enough to pack her life into. Then, with him by her side, she'd driven eight long hours out of Angeles before pulling into a rest stop when the adrenalin had died down and he was yawning. She said she needed to sleep because that sounded plausible. It sounded better than, "I need to check we're not being followed and I need to dispose of my weapons before they use roadblocks to pin me down." It also sounded better than the whiny, "please," which she felt coming from her stomach. So he slept and Sydney broke into a gas station, microwaved her beretta in the foods aisle and was even polite enough to put out the fire the implosion of plastic caused. In the toilets she changed her clothes and tried not to cry.  
  
Didn't work.  
  
Least the empty forecourt didn't judge her when she fell to her knees and screamed. Wailed long and loud as she used the heel of her stiletto boot to crush her beeper to dust. It took a while for the panic to die down, for her lungs to stop pounding, for the smell of smoke to leave her nose, and then she picked herself up. Like she'd been trained. At 5AM she murmured something about the sunrise and settled herself in for another four hours driving. Will, who was a smart guy, was prescient enough not to begin small talk.  
  
*  
  
When they arrived Will tried to kiss her as she locked up the van. She realised, then, what a come on, "Drive with me now to my beach condo upstate," must have appeared to be. So, she kissed him back. She also ran her hands through his hair and pulled down his zipper.  
  
She'd like to think there was another reason. A better reason, maybe. But mainly she did this because she owed him.  
  
And that was enough.  
  
**  
  
[Then]  
  
To explain anything, you have to trace its history. Modern Europe made no sense without a grasp of the horrors of the Second World War. The way Matt Sullivan looked at you in the library is useless without a replay of that very drunken Christmas party of two years ago. The digital radio you can inject beneath your skin is boggling without an overview of the four or four major technical advances of the last hundred years. Your lovely, sleek driveway, inlayed with brick, is empty without the eruption of igneous rocks from the centre of the earth. People are nothing without evolution, or the advent of TV.  
  
SD-6 made no sense unless you traced its history. In the beginning, a group of spies breaks away, because it's easier to trade secrets than to keep them. Predictably, their operation looks to span the globe. They pose as national security forces; MI6, ASIS, GSG9 and not forgetting the CIA, in order to recruit trainees. During the Cold War, they run the show. The legitimate national security agencies are quite happy to barter with the mercenaries when they need this or that KGB secret, whichever Box 55 clearance or code five Mossad intelligence briefing.  
  
But after the Cold War things become…difficult.  
  
The sleek SD-6 operation proves ill-suited to the mud-hut warfare of the terrorist generation. The old contacts in Eastern Europe are quickly turned-over to high profit Mafia outfits. North Korea looks to appeasement with the United States. China welcomes international trade. All of a suden there's little room for a body designed purely to sit squarely in the middle. SD-6 finds itself in need of making the news, re-opening the trade routes and funding the terror organisations. SD-6 has to create fear in order to exploit it, in order to survive, halt amalgamation and finally extermination.  
  
Naturally, SD-6 goes too far, too fast. Gets a little too used to how easy it is to hold the world to ransom with an agent count of a paltry five hundred and six. By the time Sydney Bristow is recruited plans have moved beyond general agitation into something much more ambitious. Systematic consumption of the military bodies of four African nations, two eastern European bodies and a powerful Asian conglomerate. Extermination of rival organisations such as K-Directorate, and siphoning of funds into legal operations such as arms or communication. SD-6 and its father organisation get big, fast. Big enough for the other organisations to exercise some damage limitation, and to do it together.  
  
And in the world of espionage, 'damage limitation' wasn't just a euphemism, it was a mother-fucking threat.  
  
Sydney made no sense unless you spin back to a room posing as a blood- mobile on a University Campus. Unless you witness Agent Michael Vaughn of the CIA explaining the vastness of SD-6's operation. Unless you imagine Sydney Bristow cradling her dead boyfriend in her arms. Unless you watch her mother betray her and her father redeem her. She is nothing unless you understand that she only wanted to do good in the world. She ceases to exist if you forget she's ready to die for a cause -- any cause -- that presents itself as being worth her valuable time.  
  
Sydney made no sense without the understanding that she should have been dead long before now.  
  
Three days ago, history caught up with her. Her and SD-6.  
  
**  
  
[Now]  
  
She was a funny sort of alone when the talking began. The sort of alone that necessitated Will standing in the doorway, balanced against the frame so he could do the paper crossword. The sort of 'talking to herself' Will was 'sort of' going to overhead and save her from.  
  
"You know, when you're a CIA agent, working deep undercover -- ," she started, regretting it immediately, but also finding it hard to stop.  
  
"Wha--?" He came through the doorway, quickly, urgently.  
  
"When you're working deep undercover and you die, if you're killed, they don't list your death."  
  
"Again. What?"  
  
"You die as the person you were. You see, you die as if you were that person, that undercover person. You don't even get to die as yourself, when even you don't really care anymore, and no one really gives a shit…"  
  
She was trying not to cry, she really was. She was thinking, "Please don't cry, please don't," but the tears used that as a diversion, her mind looked the other way, and they rolled down her cheeks anyway.  
  
Three days. Three days since everything. She hasn't eaten because of the swelling. Even Will has noticed the bruising.  
  
He'd brought her ice cream and cookies from the parlour where she met the boy. He'd said the place was a little "spooky," which made her smile. She liked his normal version of "spooky." This mumbling about the CIA is all she'd said to him in two days of cohabitation.  
  
She guessed he thought it was because, like the eating, it hurt her to talk. It does, but not in the way he thinks.  
  
Will, as usual, did most of the talking anyway. Before now he'd told her about the "cool" manhunt story they're running on the news stations, and asked her at least twenty times what the sex (the sex they had against the van, and on the floor, and in the bedroom) meant. Each time she'd shrugged and each time he'd answered his own questions. He thinks he can work it all out for her. She loves him for that.  
  
Characteristically, it turned to Will to break the heavy silence that had settled. "Syd, you need to wash. You smell bad."  
  
She tried a smile. "Help me?"  
  
He reached over and lifted her shirt above her head. He even wrinkled up his nose as a sort of theatrical reaction to the odour, an attempt to keep the smile that was slipping from her lips. He led her to the shower and showed amiable skill in unclipping her bra. "It's strange to see you like this…" he began.  
  
"What? Naked?"  
  
"No," and he shook his head sadly. "Vulnerable."  
  
She loves that he thinks she's vulnerable. Despite the scars, she's never vulnerable.  
  
*  
  
In the night she has a dream. Disturbingly, it wakes her to a reality that is all the more frightening.  
  
She'd seen her apartment wrecked before. She'd been followed. She's been tortured. She's had most of the limbs in her body broken at some point or other.  
  
But.  
  
Standing in line at the bagel store (in broad, mid-afternoon daylight no less) and watching the glass front shatter to the tune of automatic machine gun fire was, to say the least, a new experience.  
  
A black sedan (no expense spared) in a typical, mob-style drive-by hit. All very quick, but messy too. She remembers a man in a cashmere coat screaming about his unpaid parking tickets and that the hail-marys were louder than the breaking glass.  
  
She fell.  
  
--Chipped three teeth and bruised an eye socket. Her hands still sting from the tiny shards of glass that cushioned her fall --  
  
Then she ran. Managing three blocks in less than forty seconds was good, but not good enough, because they were smart enough to follow by vehicle and not commit too early to foot. She was glad they'd at least sent a trained unit to take her out.  
  
Showed some respect, you know?  
  
It took her another two blocks to remember that she was armed. She shot back, firing an expletive with each round because she was too exhausted to care. (Anyway, when was a girl in ripped black khakis, bleeding from the mouth with glass in her hair really a candidate for Miss Congeniality?) She looked everywhere for a way out, eventually climbing a trash-can, dropping her weapon as she did so, and pulling herself onto the roof of a Mexican restaurant before running some more.  
  
She made perhaps ten metres across the flat before being stopped, dead. They'd anticipated her run and they'd prepared. A man, in a long coat and shiny shoes stood square in front of her.  
  
--If she didn't know any better, she'd say he came from nowhere. But Sydney was well aware that something never came from nothing. If anything, her entire life was proof of that principle. --  
  
She doesn't remember what exactly stopped the running; whether it was his sociable nod to her when she realised (in panic) that he had her pinned down or the bullet that whizzed over her shin and took a chunk of flesh with it. Regardless, she hit the ground hard, hurting so much she wasn't even sure, at first, where she'd been shot.  
  
He was alarmingly quiet for a hit man. Usually, they smelled of liquor or had the shake of a narcotics abuser. Mostly, they killed people to buy Barbies for their three-year-old daughters. Normally, they didn't look at you as they fired the final shot. But this guy was different. The man sent to kill Sydney Bristow was wearing a dark gray suit with cool, black shades that reflected her own face -- and her own fear -- back towards her.  
  
He didn't even try to shush her when she screamed. Probably because he was a professional. Probably because he knew, if she was screaming, she didn't have anything else.  
  
When she dreams she sees his dark face looking down at her and his semi- automatic held steady in aim.  
  
When she dreams she sees his too-white teeth exposed as part of a shapeless hole-in-his-face he probably called a smile.  
  
When she dreams he fires the shot and he pities her as she dies.  
  
When she wakes, she remembers.  
  
She remembers sweeping a foot out and taking his legs from under him. She remembers the crack of bone as his body and his head struck the floor. She remembers springing to her feet and kicking him in the stomach. She remembers the way he wrapped his arms around her legs like he was drowning. She remembers rolling him left and right and landing punches and receiving blows. She remembers the heady beat of a passing helicopter as she reached into his pocket and found his second weapon.  
  
She will always remember the look on his face when she pulled the trigger.  
  
She tries to remember to have no remorse for what she's done.  
  
No remorse.  
  
Then, she wonders if she'll ever sleep again.  
  
**  
  
[Sand]  
  
Will still goes out three times a day; for a jog on the beach, for food and to use the internet at the local cafe. She hasn't had the heart to tell him that it "might not be safe," or to reveal the bag she has packed beneath her bed ready for the inevitable ditch and run.  
  
She talks to him in muted tones and smiles only when she wants him to shut up.  
  
Will had gone jogging at three when the sun still graced the sky. He'd asked her to go with him but she'd refused. Pointed to the bruises on her ribs (the ones she said she'd got "falling over,") and dropped into the nearest chair with a yawn to prove her point. But Will had been growing restless lately and had tried every trick in the book until she finally consented to watch him from the wicker chair on the porch. It was a compromise, and one she welcomed. It saved his pressing questions over why she'd felt compelled to burn his cell in the hearth whilst he was out. It also saved her aching head.  
  
Still, it was nice to watch his blonde head bob as he sprinted down the split. So nice, she resolved to stay for a while to watch his blue shirt become a blob on the horizon and finally for the entirety of Will Tippin to become the horizon.  
  
Dangerously, when Will was long from view and her watch said four o'clock she had started to think. Her mind had lingered. She'd played a neat game of, "What if…," that had grown steadily more vital.  
  
It had started with a concession.  
  
Sometimes, when it's dark she forgets who she is. Forgets her life -- forgets the way it hurts her face to look left, hurts her jaw to chew -- and she imagines. She imagines everything. She wonders what everything would be like if she were a normal person, with a nice car and nicer children. She wonders what everything would be like if Danny was still alive, smiling at her, nodding his head and understanding her.  
  
There's more.  
  
She wishes the worst thing in her life was watching the man she loved die and fucking a friend because she needed someone. She wishes the worst things in her life were need, remorse and incompletion. She wishes it was only Will she needed to apologise to. She wishes her life were that simple  
  
She watches the waves lap the shore and she wishes. She wishes the worst thing in her life wasn't watching the man she loved die, and then watching it all happen again. She wishes the one man who could have understood wasn't dead.  
  
She wishes so much for someone with so little.  
  
-- She hears Will laugh and feels his weight on the boards as he mounts the porch behind her. She has wishes for him too. He rushes up, kisses her shoulder and breathes, "Decided to go for the loop, you know, instead of the straight, straight…straight thing."  
  
Wishes he weren't involved. Wishes she wasn't in love with his warm predictability.  
  
And more. --  
  
She wishes that when she reached inside the jacket pocket of a man in gray Armani hired to kill her she'd found a stick of gum, a cell phone -- hell -- even a picture of his child. She wishes she hadn't reached inside his pocket, run her fingers over the silk lining and found his badge.  
  
She wishes with all of her soul that the badge wasn't CIA.  
  
She wishes her life wasn't hers. She wishes she were the girl in low slung jeans whose biggest problem was her jerk of a father and the weight of her virginity.  
  
There's no surprise when she stands up, turns around and strokes Will's cheek. There's no surprise when she feels a familiar speck of attraction and kisses his lips  
  
No surprise, when she wishes Will Tippin were Michael Vaughn.  
  
Hey, there's even a soft familiarity to the way the pit of the stomach twists when she thinks about him.  
  
Vaughn. CIA. Gone. Betrayed. She wishes…  
  
…too much.  
  
[End of Part 1]  
  
**  
  
Notes:  
  
I hope to have part two out exactly a week after the publication of part one. If I don't manage this don't get mad, this story will finish, and is precisely planned down to a neat three parts.  
  
MI6 = British secret intelligence service  
  
ASIS = Australian equivalent (there is also the DSD)  
  
GSG9 = German Grenzscutzgruppe 9  
  
Mukhabarat = Egyptian Intelligence and security.  
  
SVR = Sluzhba Vneshnei Razvedki. Russian post cold war intelligence service performing most of the functions handled by the older KGB.  
  
Box 55 = Peace time reference to UK's MI5 (internal security outfit)  
  
Mossad = Israeli intelligence. 


	2. To Get Down

American Triangle Part 2: To Get Down  
  
Rating: R, just to be safe  
  
Disclaimer: Abrams, Touchstone, ABC, no copyright infringed, no profit made  
  
Notes: English spellings and this is STILL an AU despite some leanings towards canon. Spoilers are very mild, limited only to dialogue snatches.  
  
Credits: Ash is the goddess of beta. She reels me back in when I'm way over my head (often.) My profuse thanks to her.  
  
  
  
**  
  
[Interrogation]  
  
He was about to shout. She could feel it coming. After five days cooped up together with little or no explanation Will had got restless and bored, irritated and then obstinate. He liked to pace the small kitchenette at the rear of the lounge, or launch himself dramatically out of the door, but he'd yet to shout. That was still to come.  
  
Sometimes, he'd just sit at the other end of the room and look at her. Lean back in his chair and tap his chewed pencil against the desk like she was some uncooperative source and he was back at the newspaper.  
  
He'd asked if he could call the newspaper. She'd said no.  
  
Mostly, he just found his place somewhere near her, somewhere that was comfortable, not too close. He'd stopped trying to fill in the conversation gaps days ago. At the time, the new calm had been a blessing but she missed his voice, and often found herself listening to his breathing, sharp but steady, to shake off the temptation to think too long or too hard about anything. He looked after her so well it was almost hard to find the time to think. He cooked all her meals and even attempted, in a loose, mannish way, to keep the whole place tidy. She'd even caught him making her…  
  
"Fuck this, Sydney!" Will suddenly shouted, leaping from his chair in emphasis and then toeing it across the room as the last of the shout left his lungs. It landed a moment later in an all too solid form a paltry half metre away. "Damn," he said, running his hands through his hair, "that's gotta bruise the ego. Thought I could at least break the damn chair. You know, I never was any good at sports…"  
  
She laughed, "Will…"  
  
He turned sharply and pointed at her, shook his head. "No. No. The 'Fuck this,' still stands. The anger still stands. For a second, pretend I am not the weakest guy alive and I did break your chair. The chair breaking still stands. See, I want to know what's going on. I want to know why you're not talking, and why you're bruised…and I'd be kinda interested to know why you burnt my cell. I liked that cell. So, to paraphrase," he took a long breath and then fell to sit on the sofa beside her, "what the fuck is going on?"  
  
"Nothing."  
  
"Nothing?" He smiled at her, or at least made a face where his lips pursed, the ends drew upwards and his forehead wrinkled. "I feel like that guy who's last to know everything. You know that guy who arrives at the party and says, "Ho! Well lookie damn, is it fancy dress?" I'm never that guy. I'm the guy ahead of the game. I work on a fucking newspaper for God's sake."  
  
There's no desire in her to tell him anything. She's quietly sick of honesty. Bored to tears of TV programs preaching the gospel of overpriced self-help books. They were all the same anyway: the only way to have a good relationship was to indulge in total honesty, to keep no secrets, to tell everybody all that you know so they can't accuse you of being indifferent, or dead inside. To wear your heart on your sleeve like a huge sauce stain. To be so outside you have to wonder if there's anything left inside. To…  
  
Such Oprah-inspired faux-psychology was bullshit and she wished people would hurry up and realise that. People were happier when you lied to them about their hair or their make-up, forgave you better when you apologised even though they were wrong, loved you more when you said you loved them too. Life was lies and counter lies and not spending the energy to separate one from the other. Sydney was even in the business of lying and yet people kept asking her to tell the truth. Hadn't that done enough damage already?  
  
She responded to Will calmly, turning her head slowly. "What do you want to know?"  
  
She saw the way his eyes lit up and his tongue darted out to lick his lips. She was almost sorry when the words, "Things have been pretty tough at the bank recently," spilled from her mouth.  
  
But Will's not bothered. He even nods his head rhythmically to urge her continue.  
  
"And we've been having trouble with some hostile takeover moves…"  
  
[Dauphine]  
  
It was a very efficient job they pulled, when she thinks about it. To take out the entirety of the LA operation (for all she knew the entire operation) in the fifty-eight minutes she'd spent buying bagels and fighting for her life was no mean feat.  
  
It was almost unreal. Almost television. Almost blurring the line between what she knows is true and those Sixties spy shows she watches late night on cable.  
  
Too clean, in many ways. Too easy.  
  
She ran eight blocks with the CIA agent's badge stuffed down the back of her pants -- sweating, hurting -- before she found a call box. A passing woman with unruly blonde hair consented to lend her a dollar in change as long as Sydney took her advice ("call your mother, go to the ER and maybe think about the methadone program,") and Sydney had hurriedly thrown the coins into the slot.  
  
There were three rings before it picked up. "Dixon?"  
  
"No," and then a deathly pause.  
  
Sydney looked around her. Across the street there was a cabstand and ten yards from that three men with dark hair were smoking and talking with their hands. Other than that, the locality appeared completely deserted. Even the usually busy LA sky was empty, no helicopters, no small jets. It was quiet enough to take a chance. Enough for her to bank on there being no surveillance team, or, more realistically, for her to bank on them being the kind of team that didn't like to kill in cold blood.  
  
"Marshall?" she asked, her voice low, her hands cupping the receiver close to her face.  
  
There was along pause and then, "Yes," which was so quiet it was almost indistinguishable from static on the line.  
  
"Marshall you've got to listen to me carefully. I expect you're being watched right now so I'll take two taps for no and one for yes. Got that?"  
  
One tap was heard.  
  
"Marshall, are you in the office?"  
  
One tap.  
  
"Is Sloane there?" Tap. "Dixon?" A pause. Then two taps.  
  
"Is Dixon somewhere else?" Two taps.  
  
Then where…?  
  
"Is Dixon dead?" If one tap could sound sad, Marshall's did.  
  
She had a wild thought about the first time Dixon asked her to meet his wife. She remembered the way he smiled when he talked about her, the way his fingers would play with the lining of his jacket pocket when he spoke. It was as if he was embarrassed he was too in love, as though it was wrong to care about something too much.  
  
Then the real thought surfaced, the one her addled brain had meant to prioritise: Diane. Oh God. What would she tell Diane?  
  
She can't imagine comforting Diane, can't imagine telling a good woman, a strong woman that her husband died a proud and true investment banker. Lying like that didn't make sense in a head that was bleeding. She couldn't see her broken face with chipped teeth, explaining, "There was an accident with a hand gun…"  
  
It was too wrong that a good man should die as an average man.  
  
Her teeth started to ache. "Is my father there?"  
  
Two taps and then the whispered words, "Come back."  
  
The line went dead and her head swam. The three men on the corner looked over at her and in her mind's eye their faces were contorted and gruesome. They laughed and they shouted and they waved their hands. The colours of their sweaters bled blue and then red and then failed to be sweaters at all. She thought about looking down at her leg to see how badly she was bleeding before she passed out.  
  
(Her leg was a bright red pulp that burned so hard she was afraid of touching for fear of setting alight.)  
  
Yet something kept her conscious.  
  
Maybe it was because she owed Marshall her life eight times over, or maybe because she didn't want to be at the mercy of the cab-standers (who were probably only wondering if the crazy, broken lady at the call box was okay) but that consciousness urged her run.  
  
To run again.  
  
The bank was only some three blocks away but with the injury -- which hurt more after she realised how bad it looked -- it took fourteen minutes.  
  
Fourteen minutes seemed like a long time, then. More than it did when she was late, or curled up watching television. Fourteen minutes seemed like an eternity, a quiet universe scored only by the pounding of her feet against the sidewalk.  
  
And as it was, there was a lot to think about.  
  
For a start, she'd yet to decide how she was going to save Marshall, not to mention the rest of the SD-6 office. She considered a full assault. Running straight through the lobby and towards the elevator. Clawing the doors open and if the car wasn't there -- fuck it! -- climbing the shaft.  
  
Wait, wait, wait. Slow down.  
  
Climbing three floors with a dead leg and a dead CIA agent's weapon was improbable at the very best. Even if she did get up there she'd only prise open the final set of doors and -- bang! -- be unceremoniously killed by whoever they'd placed on the entrance.  
  
If you were going to isolate an area you'd always cover the exits. Always. At the very least cover them until you'd neutralised any threat and secured the area totally, read: until you'd killed everybody.  
  
Sydney was praying that they hadn't killed everybody. She had Marshall's dark, horribly slow tones playing over and over in her mind as she limped from street corner to street corner. Marshall had never talked like that before. Usually, Marshall's sentences were so quick his words blurred into one. He was always "yepokaygreat," in response to anything, never waiting to bore you with an explanation -- as rounded as his were -- if he could physically spit it out without pausing, or differentiating sentences. She can't remember when he first joined SD-6 but she's crystal-clear in her recollection of their first meeting at the coke vendor and the hiccupy, nervous way he explained to her the actual, honest-to-God differences between Coca Cola and Pepsi.  
  
She wanted to hear that again. Anything to hear the chemical differentiates and historical contexts between Coke and Pepsi again. Anything.  
  
Four blocks away and twelve minutes in, she started to run scenarios again. She expected them to cover the carpark, and maybe to have gassed the airvents (made to Agency standards to be big enough for a person to crawl through, yet littered with enough false exits to confuse an unwelcome visitor) but not to have prepared contingencies. She was hoping they didn't have a plan b in case of a power cut or points of reference for a building wide gas leak. She hoped they didn't have a contingency for her -- bruised, broken, destructive, slightly wobbly on her feet -- launching all out to buy SD-6 time.  
  
All she could give them was time.  
  
Fourteen minutes meant turning a corner and seeing the shiny glass of Dauphine and feeling all at once a little crazy on the adrenaline and a little high on hope.  
  
But fourteen minutes was too late.  
  
There was no more time.  
  
She tried to run through it but the shock of energy; sound, light, pain was enough to finally push her to the floor. The metal and wire of what had been the bank crashed around her. Glass fell like crystal rain. SD-6's very floor smoked a frightening gray. People rushed out from other buildings and waved their hands and watched, slack jawed, asking the same question over and over, "Is there something I can do? Is there a way I can help?"  
  
No, no, no and no. They were all gone. It was over.  
  
It was four o'clock in the afternoon but the sky soon smudged black. The close, Los Angeles heat set in all over her skin, sneaked under her clothes. She had never felt more lost, more alone than when the paramedic -- a wild haired woman with rich dark skin and a gapped tooth -- had to ask her three times, "What's you name, sweetheart? What's your name, sweetheart? Come on now, what's your name honey?"  
  
"Sydney."  
  
"And where you from Sydney?"  
  
The woman talked to her as if she were some lost and frightened child. Wrapped in a blanket, perched on a gurney with at least three fire trucks and eighteen news crews swarming around her, their colours hurting her eyes, Sydney guessed she looked pretty much like a frightened child. Especially when she pointed to the smoking building as another paramedic bandaged her leg and sutured her cuts, and blurted out, "I come from up there."  
  
"There?" the paramedic woman asked, whose namebadge was too shiny and plastic for Sydney's tired eyes. "There?" She pointed to the floor that smouldered.  
  
"Yeah," said Sydney, smiling. "Yeah."  
  
It was finally refreshing to admit that a great part of herself -- a huge part of herself -- owed a debt to SD-6. That behind the anger of the betrayal, behind the lies and the crosses, there was still an affection, still a belonging and a knowing. Definitely a belonging, at least. A significant part of her -- a latent trust, an exhausted sense of family -- died along with the building.  
  
Leaving only the hate.  
  
The hate was strong. So strong she sometimes thought it would kill her -- the real her -- and rule her body like some infestation, like some disease. A hate that made her act, and a hate that grew inside her and then lashed out.  
  
Maybe too much hate because some days she thought she lived for it, some days found it fed her like a drug. Maybe too much hate because when she looked up at the darkened building she felt more sensation in her throbbing leg than in her heart.  
  
Maybe too much hate.  
  
She wasn't given time to think too hard about it though, before a microphone was pushed into her face. A plump-faced network reporter grinned sympathetically at her as she slipped the paramedic what looked like a fifty-dollar bill. She turned to camera. "I'm here with an employee of Credit Dauphine, whose Los Angeles office was ravaged by a terrible fire this afternoon. Luckily, all the staff escaped uninjured."  
  
With a clinical accuracy Sydney smiled, giggled, waved and then asked, "Is that on?"  
  
To which the reporter replied, "Why yes, honey, play your cards right and you'll be on the six o'clock."  
  
It took Sydney only twenty seconds to scream in delight, reach her good leg out to drop the camera man to the floor, apologise profusely, stumble forward, attempt to lift the camera and then -- oops -- drop it on the floor again.  
  
The overly-blonde reporter's face seized, a mountain of botox injections making it almost impossible for her to even attempt anger. "Are you on morphine or something you fuck?" she spat, whilst her face remained startlingly serene. "Do you have some kind of problem?"  
  
Sydney resisted the urge to shout, choosing instead to wrap her fingers together like an awkward schoolgirl and say, "So, like, this means I won't be on the six-o-clock?"  
  
It was all about the training. The training that SD-6 had given. The SD-6 that wasn't there anymore.  
  
Clutching the CIA badge in her back pocket, she knew the man she had to find.  
  
And she had to find him soon.  
  
*  
  
[Negotiation]  
  
"…so I didn't know what to do. I mean, I'm definitely gonna lose my job…they probably set the fire themselves, insurance write off so that when it all comes to light, they'll have something to play with…"  
  
"But the bruises?" Will said, reaching over to reverently brush his fingers over the small red marks that sat beneath her left eye. "What about the bruises?"  
  
The bruises were going to be hard to cover, story wise. Will wouldn't believe that her boss had attacked her, ("Syd, I know you wouldn't stand for shit like that,") nor would he continue to believe that she'd fallen over, ("Fallen over what, exactly, some three-hundred pound weight- lifter?") or some bull shit tale about a car accident, (rebuffed by the simple, "Well, why didn't you say…?").  
  
It would have to be clever, or, diversionary. "The bruises…ah…" she looked down at her hands. "The bruises probably need disinfectant or something. Hey Will, did you say there was a hypermarket in town? Something about a freaky ice cream parlour…"  
  
"I said "spooky" parlour, 'spooky' a whole lotta different to freaky."  
  
"But anyway…"  
  
"Anyway…yes, hypermarket," he sighed. "What do you want me to get you?"  
  
"I want to come with you."  
  
"Oh," Will said, looking genuinely surprised. It was coming up to a week and she'd not left the condo once. Not once, which in itself had become more suspicious than the bruises, bruises that would, eventually, heal.  
  
"So, let's…" Sydney said, moving quickly from her chair. She finally felt confident enough to put weight on her bad leg, which had incapacitated her in two ways, first to hurt so much she couldn't move and then to offer her the convenient excuse not to move.  
  
Will stayed seated for a minute, a stunned expression still playing on his face.  
  
Sydney knew Will. He'd dated enough women to know that it meant more to avoid a question, than to answer it. She also realised that he probably knew a lot more than he was telling. Maybe a little too much more. Then, for the eightieth time she regretted bringing him and for the twentieth considered leaving him.  
  
Then, he jumped from his chair, smiled at her, clapped his hands and said, "Let's get this show on the road…"  
  
At which point she understood that he was good at make believe too. Maybe, together, they could make the lies work.  
  
**  
  
[Hypermarket]  
  
The hypermarket was one of the newer additions to the town. Before, when she last came, it was a chain of grocers by the name, "Fulsome, Henry and Stash," which had a neat way of imbedding on the memory.  
  
It was clean now, more efficient than it was with squeaky-clean polished floors and bargain boards. Yet there was an air of fresh claustrophobia about the place that may have been the fault of the glaring strip lights or the guy at the counter who was too well built, too well dressed for the marijuana crowd of a north California beach town. He was probably CIA. She figured they'd come first. She was their hit. She was their mess.  
  
Subconsciously -- or maybe all too consciously -- she reached into her purse for the small knife she always carried. Her actual weapon was probably still in a restaurant trash can and the CIA gun was probably still smouldering somewhere along the highway. Some penknife hack job that Marshall had given her (making it look innocuous and in fact be deadly) was all she had to defend herself.  
  
And yet despite the fact she still had her eyes trained on the muscled shoulders of a man who simply didn't "fit" and had a distant thought about how long it'd actually take Will to, "Go and get the papers, if ya don't mind…" it wasn't her knife she pulled from her purse.  
  
No, it was a scrap of paper containing a name and a number.  
  
"Vaughn: 555 8769."  
  
**  
  
[Vaughn]  
  
In kindergarten, they'd taught Sydney that all stories have a beginning. This one is no exception.  
  
Boy meets girl.  
  
{Granted, girl is sporting a shock of red hair and eyes so dark they were nearly black. Granted, he circles her nervously and stands behind her -- just to the left -- afraid she'll lash out. Granted, he thinks she's some kind of crazy person.}  
  
Despite all that, boy gets to know girl.  
  
{At first she think he's a little young. And then she knows he's young, and has that smack of 'rookie' about him despite the years he's put in at the Agency. She guesses desk job and she guesses right. She asks him the hard questions and is surprised when he answers right. "Why are you here?" "To help you." "And if I'm lying?" "Then I'm here to kill you."}  
  
Momentarily, boy loses girl.  
  
{For a good week he hated the Agency for that. Maybe would have left if he didn't have faith in two things -- his patience and her bullshit detector. Spent way too much time on the squash court that week, shuttling the ball around like it was Devlin personified. Relieved, vindicated and just a little smug -- just a little -- when the call came back with, "She wants you.")  
  
Boy and girl awkwardly express their feelings for one another.  
  
{"Are you romantically interested in anyone? It could be a question." "My Guardian Angel." "I was going to say the same to you." "You have a fight with your wife?"}  
  
Boy and girl nearly die.  
  
{So many times. Too many times. One particular time -- her return flight to LAX at 3AM -- ending in a shoot out, and a car crash downtown that wasn't as easy to clean up as the others, what with it being so close to home and all. She'd fractured a clavicle, suffered a minor concussion and broken two ribs. But the Agency wanted her out of the hospital -- too obvious a target, prone in a sheeted bed -- and expunged the hospital record. Later he guessed he was supposed to take her to her father, still unconscious and covered in his old childhood blanket, (Weiss had asked, helping her into the car, "What kind of man still has his blankie in his ride? What is that? Do I really know you at all?" with a smirk and an arch look) but he took her where it felt natural to take her. He took her home.}  
  
Girl awoke in an old bed, that creaked as she moved, in a room painted fuchsia pink with eighties heartthrob posters on the walls. "Yours?" she said to Boy, slumped in a far corner chair.  
  
"Sister's," he replied with a nod. "Had to get you out of the hospital…didn't think they'd have cased here yet…"  
  
Girl read trashy romance novels all through Junior High. Books they even kept on the high shelves. Girl knows what comes next.  
  
Girl asks, "How long am I staying?"  
  
Boy nods, "Until you're better."  
  
"And you're…?"  
  
"Staying right here."  
  
"With me?"  
  
"Yeah."  
  
Yeah.  
  
Girl and boy spend a long period of time alone together.  
  
*  
  
It was late. That time halfway between night and morning, just before the birds sang but after the black night had turned a wet grey.  
  
He was watching late-night television on a set that looked older than she did. He was casual in shorts and a t-shirt and reminded her less and less of someone she worked with. In a 'Kings' shirt and old blue swim shorts he looked a little human and a little average and a little better for it.  
  
"Hey," he whispered to her, almost hiding his voice in the blare of the television.  
  
"Hey," she whispered back, before clutching her head. " I had weird dreams…"  
  
"Concussion," he nodded. "Once I dreamed that my mother was cheese." She laughed and he grinned before continuing, "No, true story. Anyway, you probably want some Advil…"  
  
"Please."  
  
He sloped off to the kitchen -- all his starched posture suddenly gone -- and she settled into the huge sofa beneath the large bay windows that dominated the living room. It was strange. Walls overflowing with pictures and certificates -- Vaughn here, Vaughn there, Vaughn at college, Vaughn with his sister, Vaughn in hockey pads, his High-school diploma, a CIA headshot of the man she assumed to be his father, his sister, his sister's husband, his sister's wedding, Vaughn in a tux, fleeting pictures of Vaughn's mother, the back of her head, her wide-brimmed wedding hat, her curled, bouncy brown hair -- and a chintz wallpaper, floral scent and shag carpet that just weren't him. But at the very same time were him, the very essence of him.  
  
"Advil," he said, throwing the packet over at her from the doorway before coming in entirely and setting a tumbler of water down on the table in front of her. "Good for the soul."  
  
He didn't move to sit down, hovered above her and then followed her eye line to the wall filled with pictures. "The Vaughn family tree, circa relocation to the United States," he explained. "Everything there is to know about… no, actually, everything my mother knows about…"  
  
She looked up at him. "And what doesn't your mother know about?"  
  
He sighed, muttered, "And that would be telling," before falling into the sofa opposite her.  
  
There was a pause while the television blared and she wondered exactly what to say to him. Two avenues of conversation; the wonders of Advil and its many restorative effects or work, their work. Neither seemed appropriate.  
  
He saved her the trouble. "Doesn't look like me, does it? All of that," nodding towards the wall.  
  
"No," her words were crisp. She added a, "Not really," and a shrug to soften them.  
  
"Truth is, I'm pretty normal. Average, almost. My mom's proud of me and I buddy about with my sister's husband. I play local league hockey. Thought I was in love with my High School sweetheart…"  
  
"Thought?"  
  
"Okay," he shook his head. "I was in love with my High School sweetheart, it was just that I didn't know what…"  
  
"…being in love meant," she finished for him, nodding. "I've been known to act pretty normal myself. You know have normal thoughts, do normal things." She knocked two Advil back with skill. "But what about now, I mean, do you know what love is? Do you know what love means now?"  
  
He fixed her in his gaze. "I have a pretty good idea." Then he stood, moved over to the television, clicked it off and announced, "I've gotta get some sleep…"  
  
"Goodnight," she said quietly, catching his eye and smiling.  
  
"Goodnight," he replied, before leaning down and kissing her softly on the lips.  
  
They could have written it off as innocent. But they both knew that wasn't true.  
  
Normal, maybe, but never innocent.  
  
*  
  
Boy makes passable attempt at pretending he never kissed girl.  
  
{A new addition to the genre. First, Vaughn ignored her, then he brought Weiss to all of their briefings like a chaperone, then he began a puzzling season of smiling at her, realising he was smiling, and immediately stopping.}  
  
Girl eventually confronts boy over kiss…  
  
{…and ends up convincing herself it was a bad idea in the first place. It was probably just nerves. It was probably just so wrong it was right. It was probably very right. It would be probably be nice to repeat. It would probably…}  
  
…boy apologises.  
  
{I was way out of line. I'm sorry. I took advantage. You were…probably…just… Do we have to talk about this? I would be very happy if we never talked about this.}  
  
Boy and girl nearly get killed again.  
  
*  
  
"Don't ever do that to me again! Don't you ever do that again! Don't…don't even think -- think -- about doing it again. Ever! You understand?"  
  
What little cover Vaughn had -- "I work for the CIA, ma'am. Desk job. Oh no smile no espionage. You know most of that's just TV talk." -- had been blown.  
  
The larger organisations had got wind of who he was, how important he was and his likely continued importance to any double agents that existed.  
  
It was easier to cover the mole than to be the guy covering the mole.  
  
So, they'd come after him. Trashed the neat little downtown apartment he had going. Ripped through the spools of Hockey VHS he'd had, knowing that'd hit right where it hurt. Left him a day. Let the paranoia build and the CIA be unable to adjust resources because of budgeting problems. Then, followed him on a normal Saturday. Trailed him to his local, shadowed him in the video store, remained just obvious enough to let him know that they were there. Got him scared, pushed him just that little bit over 'worried.' Followed him to a hotel -- his apartment still uninhabitable after the crime team got a little over happy with the forensics chemicals -- and rented the room next to his.  
  
Waited and made him slightly crazy. Maybe more than slightly. Made him stay exactly where he was, feeling it was better to be alone and executed rather than risk getting help, rather than risk implicating anyone else. Made him undergo long hours of thinking himself exhaustible, ruminating on serving for his country. His country and what that meant.  
  
Colours, country, pride and….Sydney Bristow?  
  
Hampered his attempts to counter attack because he couldn't sleep for the fear of dying. A strong, controlled fear of dying that he really wished he didn't have. The hours he spent wishing he wasn't human…  
  
Weiss had been considerate enough to meet Sydney at Joey's Pizza to explain Vaughn's continued MIA status. Weiss was good for that. Good for appearing disgruntled at a government system whose idea of plausible deniability extended to the deaths of junior agents. Weiss was good at agreeing with her, nodding sympathetically, and smiling carefully when she said, "I've got to find him." Weiss was very good at replying, "Yes, you do."  
  
Truth was, Vaughn was halfway through killing the removal team when she arrived. Halfway through in the sense that his gun was trained on one guy -- after a not so clever disguise as room service, and a pistol beneath a serving cloth -- and that another gun was trained on him. Stand off. Vaughn had done the legwork, Sydney simply levelled the odds.  
  
The surprise of Sydney's entrance -- through plate glass from the balcony no less -- offered Vaughn the chance to finish his half. Sydney complied with hers and then the following dialogue took place:  
  
"Don't ever do that to me again! Don't you ever do that again! Don't…don't even think -- think -- about doing it again. Ever! You understand?"  
  
"So - okay -- fine, that's all the thanks I get for saving your ass. I mean a little gratitude…"  
  
"Look, Jesus -- no -- "  
  
Later, Vaughn would rationalise to himself that he was very tired. He would rationalise that he'd spent a long time thinking he was going to die. That he was in a semi-emotional state. That he was vulnerable.  
  
Then, Vaughn would realise that none of that explained what he did next.  
  
"I just thought, you know -- God -- that maybe things would just be really unbearable for me if anything…--anything-- and so I…selfish, I know. But, shit! I saved your life and you're making me apologise…"  
  
Vaughn didn't reply. Vaughn just grabbed her, kissed her hard and thanked the world that he was still alive.  
  
Colours, country, pride and Sydney Bristow. Definitely Sydney Bristow.  
  
Sydney's gratitude, then, was to kiss him back and say, "So we better go…"  
  
*  
  
Girl and boy get sick of avoiding their feelings and each other…  
  
{In far off cities there were even mornings together. Discrete mornings. Happy, plain mornings. There were coded letters and hushed phone conversations. They were both very good at the hiding of it all…}  
  
…friends found out, carefully.  
  
{Francie; "There's a guy. You look like there's been a guy. Someone, somewhere…" Weiss: "So you finally found yourself a life outside the office with some chick…nice going," and then with a knowing smile, "hope Bristow knows you're two-timing her."}  
  
There were really good times.  
  
{Saturdays, careful Saturdays when it was enough for them to pass in the mall, smile at each other, touch hands. Friday mornings at the end of his shift, dangerous dawn-tide when desire got the better of them and the thinking -- the finding of somewhere safe -- was almost beyond them.}  
  
There were bad times.  
  
{Arguing, long and hard, in warehouses because the training lingered, the mantra: "this isn't right." Their parents, more than anything, raising such rows above the "shouldn't fraternise at work" rule, that and the interests of national security.}  
  
And then there was…  
  
{…five days ago, with shrapnel in her leg and smoke in her lungs and what he had said. What he had said to her.}  
  
Girl thinks she may hate boy more than life itself.  
  
But with her current views on life, such a statement may not be strong enough…  
  
**  
  
[Watch]  
  
It took her a moment to realise that Will had arrived. He was some two feet away, probably looking at a Captain Crunch display to disguise the fact he was watching her.  
  
She wouldn't blame him. She wouldn't blame anyone for watching her.  
  
Stood, front and centre in the dried foods aisle clutching a crummy piece of paper on which one word was written.  
  
Not only, but also.  
  
Stood, front and centre in the dried foods aisle clutching a crummy piece of paper on which one word was written and not moving, not moving for at least five minutes, not moving at all.  
  
Not an inch.  
  
If Will had any patience left his question, as he approached from behind, would have been, "Syd is there something wrong?"  
  
Instead it was, "You know, if things are such a damn problem back home with the 'bank' an' all (the way he intoned bank was a little scary, almost too much cynicism) why don't you go face them rather than," he looked down at the scrap of paper and then said, "crying over some Vaughn guy in the market. Okay?"  
  
In Will Tippin-ese that was very close to a threat.  
  
"We can't go back," she said levelly, before moving off again and shaking her shoulders to prove that she was 'fine.' That kind of insipid, sallow kind of 'fine' terminally ill people were, but 'fine' all the same.  
  
"What?" Will said, momentarily stunned and left behind, before gathering his wits and running a little to catch her. "Why can't we go back? I know you said all that shit about bad debt, but that doesn't stick Syd…hell, it's probably even old copy by now…"  
  
"I can't."  
  
He grabbed her hard by both shoulders and shook her a little, bearing down on her, his glasses shining strip light in her eyes. "Why the hell not?"  
  
She didn't flinch. "Because he knows I'd come here. He knows I'm here and he'll come find me."  
  
"Who?" He tightened his grip. "Who?"  
  
" I never should have brought you…"  
  
"Who?" She dropped her eyes and tried not to wince when he squeezed her shoulders harder. "Who?" he breathed menacingly.  
  
Sometimes, when the lies were done you needed the half-truths. Only when they were exhausted did you need realities.  
  
Now was not a time for reality.  
  
"If I was missing, would you have known where I was? Would you have known?"  
  
He softened a little. "Maybe. A couple of stories, maybe…I sorta remember." He scratched his head, looked at her with eyes full of remorse and backed away. "Who's coming Syd? Just tell me…please."  
  
And if reality was still too fresh, too vivid, too colourful for hooded eyes, then you had to rely on being vague.  
  
"Help. Help's coming."  
  
"I…uh…shit…" Will dropped his arms to his sides like they were dead weights. "I can't deal with this now…I've got to go…I've got to get my head someplace…else." With that, he turned quickly and ran from the store.  
  
She felt like doing that, but the memories tied her feet to the floor.  
  
That, and she'd done enough running already.  
  
Frowning, she moved to the counter to pay for the hair clips she'd picked up to present the illusion of there being some purpose to her presence in the Hypermarket. As she did so, she nodded to the burly man who'd she'd thought was CIA. He smiled back and this time she didn't wonder why such a sharp suited individual patrolled a hypermarket.  
  
There was one thing more dangerous than paranoia, and that was fatigue.  
  
Pleased by this thought, she yawned, and began the long walk to the beach house.  
  
**  
  
[Doors]  
  
What confronted her when she rounded the corner was two parts memory, one part actuality.  
  
It was mostly familiar. The black jeep parked in the front yard. The stiff black suit and his dark hair, not quite as grey as she thought it was, not quite as lifeless in the direct sun. The way his face hardened when he saw her. The way his face said it was important for him to be invulnerable to her, that and all those other 'in' words she associated him with; indestructible, invincible, invective, intolerable, inhuman.  
  
Inhuman.  
  
It was almost familiar, the way she let the salty air enter and exit her lungs without really making the effort to consciously breathe. The way that felt better.  
  
But what was new? What was different? What was making her feel, that, something was…  
  
It was real when he fixed with dull eyes and began, "Sydney -- "  
  
So real she was shocked when he took the few steps forward needed to reach her. Surprised when he reached his arms around her and held her close.  
  
What's more, surprised when she let him.  
  
"Daddy."  
  
"Shhh."  
  
With her head against his chest she heard him wheeze as he breathed. For the first time in her life, she knew he hurt the same way she did. Carried the scars deep inside like medals in a secret war. Silently, slowly, watched the world reorganise itself around a brain too tired to compete.  
  
He hurt like she did.  
  
Because he hurt too much.  
  
[End of Part 2]  
  
You know what? Next part, next Tuesday. If I miss my deadline, berate me! Bishclone@ntlworld.com 


	3. All The Times You Were Told

American Triangle Part 3: All the Times You Were Told  
  
Credits: My two betas for this piece were invaluable. Ash, you darling person you! This whole operation would crumble without your efforts. My continued thanks to you for putting up with me. Rach, also, gave me a reason to keep going and get better. Her unflagging support has been a real inspiration.  
  
Also, a huge shout out to anybody who has mailed me or read and reviewed at ff.net. Constructive and always interesting, I've had a great response on this piece. (  
  
*  
  
[Trouble]  
  
Stories have middles too. Sydney knows they do.  
  
Girl is beaten, bruised. Naturally, she looks to boy for help.  
  
{He's all she can think about. She goes to his apartment. Finds he's not there. She screams at his voice on his answer machine. She turns over his place. She thinks, very much, he may be dead.}  
  
Girl has an idea of where he may be…  
  
{…takes a cab, this time. Sick from the running. The lack of food in her stomach the only thing stopping her from vomiting on the back seat.}  
  
Finds him -- strangely -- and approaches…  
  
*  
  
[Ice]  
  
Immediately, she didn't trust it.  
  
LA Municipal rink, public skating, late Thursday evening.  
  
It was logical, yes. But in her gut, wrong. It said "oblivious," it said "unaware," it said that Vaughn had no idea what was going on under his nose. She couldn't believe that, refused to.  
  
Three hours earlier SD-6's building ceased to exist. Three hours, fifty- eight minutes earlier a man with a CIA badge had tried -- very hard -- to kill her.  
  
After that, after all that, she doubted that Vaughn would go skating. In fact, a small part of her, a selfish part of her, had expected him to find her before she found him. She'd expected him to roll up in some big, armoured jeep and say something like, "Get in," in his level tones. She'd expected that. Skating hadn't been on the agenda.  
  
After she arrived she watched him a moment. He looked normal enough, perhaps even bordering on casual. He was simply practising straight skating, weaving in and out of the couples and families amassed. She saw him speak to a pert, blonde figure-skater failing her axels and felt a pang of jealousy. Wondered at the significance of the ice rink, scoped the place for other agents and then let anger get the better of her --  
  
What the fuck was he doing here? Now? Why wasn't he looking for her? What did he know? Who had he helped? Why was she so terrified of the answers to her own questions?  
  
-- and ran straight out onto the ice, in full view, slipping a little on her flat shoes to reach him, grabbed him and then --  
  
What? The pert ice princess looked over, covered a smirk with a manicured hand and skated away, nailing that axel. Sydney suddenly felt ridiculously self-conscious. She touched her hand to her temple-- a gesture of 'What was I thinking?' - to find the laceration on her forehead was clotting sticky.  
  
She wondered, for the first time, how she must look to people. The shiny, newly cleaned ice reflected her body tall and dark, a shadow with smudged features. She doubted that was the worst of it. The horror of the open- mouthed mother to her left, clutching a small child to her knee, was probably well deserved.  
  
"Sydney?"  
  
"Yes," was all she could manage. She felt mute. She felt what it was to be silent. To live in a world of screaming fears and be unable to utter even one of them. She said, "Yes," again and nodded just to be sure she still had some cognitive responses.  
  
She would not be defeated by her own emotions. She would not be defeated by his lack of the same.  
  
It was an effort after looking at him -- the lack of emotion in his face, the smoothness of his skin, his cool disregard of her -- to spit out the word, "Why?" and hold back the tears.  
  
She was suspicious -- of herself, of her damned self -- that she didn't want to cry in front of him. Classically, that had been the easy part.  
  
He shrugged, initially, and then leaned close and said, "Why did you come here?"  
  
Her jaw clenched. "To find you. Because…uh…I thought you could help. I thought you'd know…what to do. I don't know," her voice deepened, she regained some control. "I came here because I didn't think you were involved…"  
  
"Sydney --"  
  
Reality was a torment that twisted her stomach and made her bones scream. Of course. Of course.  
  
Her eyes narrowed. "But you are, aren't you? You are involved. More than that, you're very involved, you're…"  
  
(Her mother had taught her a move that was the best of them all. Very good, but difficult to pull off with conviction. Difficult, because when executed properly you'd hurt as much as the person you'd struck. Good, because that was the point.)  
  
She slapped Vaughn so hard that it stung, and his head snapped left. Yet when he turned back to look at her, she'd put money -- bet her life -- on there being more pain in her eyes, more shock in her cheeks. "You knew," she said again.  
  
"Sydney," for the third time, before dropping his eyes. Then, a painful and singular, "Yes," that hissed out between his teeth.  
  
She nodded with him as though it was obvious. But maybe it was…maybe it all was.  
  
*  
  
[Daddy's Girl]  
  
Her father listened patiently to her story. He even allowed her to make him a scotch on the rocks -- "just like old times," he'd said -- and place a fashion magazine on her lap as if she weren't explaining the end of her world.  
  
The magazine was a bright blue with pink lettering -- Cosmo, Vogue, Marie Claire, something -- and pictured was a woman with bleached blonde hair and a brilliant smile. She looked somewhat like the figure skater at Vaughn's rink and in many ways they were similar: perfect, poised, protected. Sydney had never placed much value in magazines and their philosophies, even less so now.  
  
"Is that all he told you?" he asked. "I expected Agent Vaughn to be a little more forthcoming."  
  
"He was," she sighed. "He told me everything."  
  
Her father looked down, licked the last drops of scotch from his lips. "And then?"  
  
"Then --"  
  
The girl-child part of her still believed that if she didn't say it, then it would not be true. The girl child part of her still used the word "It," as if it was, in some way, big enough to encompass everything that had made the world wrong.  
  
"Sydney?"  
  
She would not be that girl anymore.  
  
"Well, then he tried to finish the job they'd started."  
  
*  
  
[Ice Cold]  
  
"You know, I just thought… I thought all along. I mean, in the beginning I couldn't trust you. A part of me knew that, but I forgot…I forgot…"  
  
He nodded. "You forgot."  
  
The locker room -- probably a men's only one, though Sydney had long since ceased to give a shit -- had seemed a better choice of venue than the open court of the rink. The seating there was an open invitation to a sniper and Sydney's train of thought went thus: it would be very unfortunate, very unfortunate indeed, to survive for as long as she had and then be killed at a downturn skate rink. She'd got this far, many hadn't. Her duty now, more than ever, was to survive.  
  
"I thought, at the very least, you'd try to lie to me."  
  
"There's no point."  
  
"Why? Because I'm dead already?" She bit her bottom lip and balled her fist hard. Took a breath, tried to calm down, attempted some kind of relaxed pose. "Don't believe in letting a girl down gently, do you?"  
  
His eyes were dark, surprisingly calm. She wondered if he'd played this scenario out in his head. She wondered if, in that scenario, she forgave him. She wondered if, in that scenario, he even asked for forgiveness. Then, she wondered if he cared enough to invent a scenario, to envisage what would happen to her. "You should go," he said.  
  
"Not before I get an explanation. Not before you tell me --"  
  
He looked up at her. "What happened?"  
  
"Yes."  
  
He looked at her blankly and then sighed. "You really haven't thought this through?"  
  
She was about to blurt out "no" -- the honest, natural response for the man she was supposed to be honest and natural with -- but held her tongue.  
  
What was there to think through? SD-6 had been neutralised by the same organisation that had attacked her: assumption. That body was the CIA: assumption. Somebody had tried to kill her: fact. She had killed that person: fact. The SD-6 office had been dissolved: assumption. The Credit Dauphine office had been destroyed: fact. Dixon was dead: assumption. Marshall and Sloane were dead: assumption. Her father was missing: assumption.  
  
And then it presented itself, very clearly: Vaughn was involved: fact.  
  
"I know that you fit in somewhere."  
  
"But I'm a minor player," he acknowledged. "Minor."  
  
"How minor?"  
  
"Let's say that the world climate shifts, it changes. You're running a huge organisation, bigger now than counter intelligence, bigger than uncovering artefacts and wasting your budget shuffling people around the world."  
  
"But Rambaldi--" she spat out, before biting her lip.  
  
She didn't want to tell him everything. No. But with all the will in the world, holding her resolve and not screaming at him like the wronged woman -- because she was, because he had slept with her knowing that they were going to kill her, because he'd done worse than lie…he'd failed to do his job. He'd failed to be her handler. He'd failed her. -- was going to be hard.  
  
"Rambaldi," he sighed, "is close. Close to an end. Close enough to an end for other agencies to take it from here."  
  
"Other agencies?" She knew she sounded stupid, and she'd always hated that.  
  
"Well." His smile was sour, she'd like to think, forced. "No man is an island."  
  
"Oh."  
  
"So political climate alters. It changes. Spies go out of fashion. Certain bureaus in certain countries are strong armed into getting rid of certain departments. The US government makes its presence felt. Operations become difficult to run. SD-6 had to come down…" he said, moving to stand, his body language, his manner, as if he were explaining algebra to some annoying, pock marked tenth grader.  
  
He moved to his locker.  
  
She attempted to explain it to herself aloud. "So I was expendable. If SD- 6 had to go, so did I. So did everything. Like the bottom fell out of the espionage market or something…"  
  
"You were a liability."  
  
"But you, you were a liability too…as much as I am. Unless, there's more…?"  
  
Why did she want to believe he was lying to her?  
  
He turned sharply towards her, narrowed his eyes and very deliberately made his posture more aggressive, as if he was squaring up to her. As if he were commanding a stage. "You're much more stupid than I thought you were…"  
  
It wasn't enough to slap him this time. It wasn't even enough to punch him.  
  
She didn't let that stop her.  
  
He wheezed from the hit but appeared to channel the rage into swinging his locker door open violently, pausing a minute to let the sound reverberate. "You know," he licked his lips, "I'm surprised you still even want to believe that the CIA is on your side, what with all the shit you've taken. I'm surprised you don't want to pull it all down…" She moved to hit him again but he raised his hands, "Hit me if it'll make you feel better. But if I was you, I'd run now like I'd been given a second shot at life. It was a mistake for you to come here Sydney…"  
  
The break-up dialogue that was playing in her head was mumbled, confused. On the first level Vaughn was telling her she'd been double-crossed, that his Agency was quite prepared to take down her Agency and all that remained of it. His government didn't need bitter ex-spies making house in the suburbs like after the cold war. On the second level -- the sappy emotional one Sydney wished she didn't have to listen to -- he was telling her that she was just some easy lay. He was done and all the remorse he had left was to advise her to run, insinuating things'd be worse if she stayed to see him get really angry.  
  
Worst of all, on the third level she believed it was all an act, a play. A deceit, like everything.  
  
And on the fourth level? A strong desire not to analyse everything like she was in poetry class.  
  
In the intervening moments he'd pulled an old sports bag from his locker and laid it down on the bench. He was hovering over it when she asked, "Why are you telling me this?"  
  
He violently pulled the zip before looking up at her. "What'd you rather hear?"  
  
That you're lying. That you're lying.  
  
She stood, at that moment, defiant. "What would I rather hear? Well, there's a question…Okay. I dunno. Why didn't you warn me?"  
  
"I swore an allegiance to my country, my government."  
  
"Our country, our government."  
  
His eyes darted left, away from her face. He said solemnly, "Your mother, my father."  
  
In the distance, something moved. Sydney's sensory perception was shot to hell so it could have been anything; animal, mineral, fork lift truck. Vaughn tried to minimise his response to the sound, his body language saying, 'Nothing. It was nothing.'  
  
Her line was obvious. "What was that?"  
  
His less so. "Probably the Feds."  
  
She chuckled, unnerved.  
  
She was suddenly aware there was little more to be said. He'd explained (something). He'd betrayed (everything.) It would be wrong to ask the question that she wants to (So where do we stand?). It was right to assume an answer (he never loved you, never loved you.)  
  
She was a fucking idiot.  
  
"You hate me?"  
  
But she wasn't about to die.  
  
He shrugged, putting his hand into his bag. "No."  
  
She grinned, gestured to the bag with a tilt of her head, heard the sound (whatever it was) get louder and approach from behind her. "Enough to kill me?"  
  
He shrugged and his mouth opened but she didn't give him the time to speak.  
  
Whichever way she tells it, soon they were close, and soon he was on the floor, the gun from the sports bag knocked some ten metres across the tiles.  
  
Whatever she said, his response was the same. He shouted, "She's here! She's here! Sydney Bristow is here!" and a steady thud emanated from the corridor.  
  
Whichever way this goes, she ran and ran and ran from the ice rink and not once -- not until she got to a gas station with Will on a highway -- did she think she should have killed him.  
  
Not once.  
  
In every version, she knows she should've.  
  
*  
  
[Still Daddy's Girl, Maybe Still a Girl]  
  
Her father frowned.  
  
She didn't like it. "What? That's wrong? That's the wrong story?"  
  
He stood slowly, like the old, fatherly man she was slowly recognising him as, and smoothed his clothes down with his hands. The lilt of his inherited Irish accent filled the room when he said, "I really wish it wasn't true, Sydney. Really, I do."  
  
"But it is."  
  
"Yes," he nodded, moving towards the kitchenette. "It's true enough for now."  
  
The fashion magazine hadn't moved from her lap and she looked down to see a large ad for some Italian perfume company. A smiling woman was depicted, running in some silk monstrosity along a dawn beach. She looked up, through the bay windows and towards the sea. She saw how the sand had turned a golden yellow in sun and wished the weather weren't so pleasant, so innocuous. She wished there was a storm. A tiny part of her thought she deserved a storm.  
  
"Did you know this would happen?" she called.  
  
There was a pause, before he reappeared in front of her, a mug of coffee in either hand. The image was wrong, somehow. Overly domestic. Where was his scowl? Where was his emotional unavailability now?  
  
"Yes," came his answer eventually, shaking her from her thoughts.  
  
"How did you find out? CIA, SD-6…the loud speaker that seemed to make this outcome obvious to everybody but me."  
  
"I just knew that eventually this would happen…"  
  
"To me?"  
  
"To us both."  
  
He placed the coffee cup in front of her, turned to leave before changing his mind and turning back sharply. "One more thing, Sydney. Everything you just told me, all of it. Are you sure that's all there was? Was that it? This is important, Sydney."  
  
She didn't need to be told how important it was. The cuts on her face, the splinters in her fingers told her how important this was.  
  
"Yes," she affirmed in the convivial yet determined tone she saved for interviews and lies.  
  
Her heart, her mind, said 'There's more,' but, of late, those responses had become much easier to ignore.  
  
*  
  
It grew late quick. She'd given time to Henta and as a result been able to learn its ways, its tides and its seasons. A wet spring was giving way to an unbearable summer. The heat of which, she realised, would be felt for years to come.  
  
Her father prepared food she swore she'd smelled before. Mouthfuls were like memories of childhood dinner tables -- and maybe even happy times -- lost in what felt like a thousand years of denial. She felt like he was hypnotising her. With every gesture of his, with every smothered smile, there was suggestion, an instruction: act like his daughter, smile at his compliments, allow him to squeeze your hand. Part of her knew she was playing a role, but a larger part of her didn't care.  
  
It was nice to be entranced by her father again. It was nice to believe that he could keep her safe.  
  
Just after dinner he began to explain his own experience, what he so professionally called the "liquidisation" of SD-6. He admits he thought she was dead, she says she thought the same. He says he's sorry about Agent Vaughn, and carefully she looks at him and says, "What's there to be sorry about?" He tilts his head, indicating there was a lot to be sorry about, like the wise old man he is. She shrugs her shoulders and makes like the girl who doesn't want daddy to know she's discovered boys.  
  
Due to the regularity of their speech, a passer-by could be led to believe they were talking about their respective days. In reality, her father -- who, on seeing reports of a Credit Dauphine fire had gone to ground, allegedly, but more realistically had incurred his scraped knuckles and bruised cheek from a fight for his life -- was assessing her security.  
  
"You came here with a man?" he asked.  
  
"How did you know?"  
  
"Place smells of one. At first I thought it might have been Agent Vaughn…"  
  
She was suddenly sharp. "Why?"  
  
He didn't acknowledge her question. "But now I'm sure it's that journalist friend of yours. Tippin, that was his name." He paused a moment, seemingly reticent about his next question. "You sleep in separate beds?"  
  
She nodded, glumly. Her father's tone already acknowledged that he did not approve of Will. She didn't want to add injury to his insult by etching out a five-day plan of what need and hurt did to a person. How they made her itch out of her skin. How they made her crave something else.  
  
"You came here because of me, didn't you? Because of when we came here before." She nodded and he continued, "Do you know why we came here?"  
  
She looked over at him across the dinner table, tried to hide the painful memories that resurfaced, and said, "You were being hunted. You had to get away…"  
  
"No," he smiled ruefully. "I forgot our wedding anniversary. It was a gift."  
  
"But I thought. You left, so suddenly…"  
  
"I didn't want to believe what I already really knew about your mother. I wanted to believe in our family. I wanted to -- what do the therapists say -- spend some quality time?" He grinned slightly at the incredulous nature of his statement. "I know it may not have seemed that way then…"  
  
She shook her head, amazed and then stood up brightly. "I'm going to go take a bath."  
  
"Goodnight Sydney," he said, ever so naturally, as she left the table.  
  
That made her smile. The normality of that statement made her smile.  
  
She was still smiling about it-- the stupidity of it, the innocence of it, and the way it had rolled off his tongue and out of his mouth -- when she entered the bathroom.  
  
She was still smiling when she turned on the faucet, ready to run a long bath.  
  
She wondered if she could love him. She wondered if it was possible to reconcile. She felt stung by the pride of a daughter who realised that Dad -- flawed, imperfect and hard -- was human. Tactile, even.  
  
She was beginning to feel the pressure of the years lift. The years she'd lived carrying the burden of an unloved child. She felt lighter. Their distance wasn't just her fault anymore -- not good enough, her face, her smile, her love of poetry, daydreamy, proud -- but his too. Their problem.  
  
She was even still smiling when she heard the glass break and the gunfire.  
  
But that smile was lost in her scream.  
  
*  
  
[Neglected things]  
  
When her father had asked her if that was all there was to her story, she had lied.  
  
She had told untruths. She had done what she was best at. She had said, "Yes." Closed the book. Mouthed, "The End."  
  
In reality, she wasn't sure. That wasn't it. That wasn't everything. There was more to her Vaughn story, her tale of woe. So much more it constituted being a 'Something else.' A something else she'd like to think was vital, important, consequential (all those things) but was probably lies.  
  
It happened right before. Right before in a dirty locker room in a run down skate rink.  
  
In most versions of that story, she chooses not to include it.  
  
Right before Vaughn told them that she was there, right before she realised just how good he was at his job, right before she ran… Right before all of that he reached out to her…  
  
…touched her…  
  
…and stunned, she let him put his arms around her. She let him hold her, let herself become the hysterical woman from the movies who's too stupid, too dense to separate the fuzzy emotions from the mortal danger. The airhead blonde who believes that despite the deception, the double cross, he still loves her, will always love her, would never leave her. The kind of woman who believes she's dreaming before she believes she's dying. That woman: the idealist.  
  
She felt like that woman. She'd let herself get that exposed. That involved.  
  
She let him kiss her too. No, that showed too much will, too much choice. She did not let him kiss her.  
  
He kissed her and she was compelled to kiss him back. Couldn't help putting her hands to his face and listen -- actually listen -- when he breathed, "Trust me."  
  
Trust me? She'd ask 'Why?' a thousand times if she thought it would do any good.  
  
Often, when she wasn't hating, or lying, or wondering how much her broken body was worth, those words were accumulating momentum in her head.  
  
Trust him. Trust him.  
  
Part of her almost did.  
  
She didn't want her father to know that. She didn't want her father to know she'd been so stupid. She didn't want her father to know that she'd made his mistakes.  
  
A part of her didn't want her father to know that history was repeating itself.  
  
But another part knew her father would understand. And maybe that was the worst of all.  
  
*  
  
[Will]  
  
Will was sure of very few things before he consented to drive out to some beach house with Sydney.  
  
Now, he wasn't sure of anything.  
  
The hand he was looking at was attached to his arm. Yes. But what if he was hallucinating? What if he was delusional? What if someone had slipped him drugs? What if the hand was artificial, unreal? Was it still his hand? Was he in possession of it? Could it, in fact, belong to God?  
  
Thus, he may not actually be in love with Sydney Bristow.  
  
That could have been a hallucination. Spurred on by a few choice glances that may or may not, depending on interpretation, have meant, "I am deeply in love with you, Will Tippin," or "Man, I have really bad gas," Will had pursued Sydney since he met her. Why? Because she was the package. And what was the package? Smart, beautiful and funny. Sydney Bristow was the package. Will Tippin had read enough to know that nothing beat the package.  
  
So…  
  
His desire for Sydney could be born out of peer pressure, socialisation, the value consensus of a western society fuelled by capitalism, sexism, patriarchy.  
  
Sydney, if she wanted, could really kick his ass.  
  
So maybe not so much patriarchy, but…  
  
Sydney was very beautiful. Archly beautiful, carefully beautiful, humanly beautiful. It was not painful to look at her, be around her, but enlivening. The kind of beautiful that made you feel better about God (if you weren't denying your religion that week) and come to the conclusion that most of life was worth the effort of living it.  
  
It may well have just been a hormone thing.  
  
A long, drawn out hormone thing where he was just as happy to listen to her -- talk, talk about everything -- than look at her. The kind of hormone thing that involved the thinking that one day there'd be a house, and maybe children, and the reading of a trash novel at the airport leading to the belief that Dante would be a really great name for your first child. That kind of love-everlasting, cerebral and emotional hormone thing.  
  
So maybe not the hormone thing.  
  
But -- and here it was -- here, in this little shit of a town on the coast (though he'd grown quite fond of it) he was getting tired. Lost. Pissed off. Angry. Enraged. Livid.  
  
Yes, definitely livid.  
  
Livid when he saw the jeep in the driveway (what happened to getting away from it all?) Livid when he approached the door and heard the tones of a man (which man? Who man?) Livid enough to believe that she was a bad person. Livid enough to believe he was being used. Livid enough to run through the scenarios Jenny had etched down in her article, "What to do if your man is getting you down!" and settle on number fourteen specifically. 14# : Is he worth it? Do you really feel that he loves you? There are so many fish in the sea, girlfriends. If you ain't getting the right kinda of love then make it very clear -- very clear -- that you'll be fishing in some other pond from now on…  
  
Jenny couldn't write for shit, but the advice was sound.  
  
He was thinking himself out of love ever since the incident in the Hypermarket.  
  
He thought he was out of love when he put his hand on the door handle and heard her voice -- definitely emotional, but agitated -- and maybe even thought himself cured, disembarking the Syd-love express, as he opened the door.  
  
"Will? Oh God Will…" was all she said.  
  
But she didn't need to explain.  
  
Her hands were red with blood, her hair matted down and stuck to her face. She had been sweating and the furniture -- including the chair he couldn't break -- was littered across the room. The air smelled of death and gunpowder.  
  
A man, to Will's left had a gun raised in Sydney's direction. A man, to Will's right, had a gun raised in Will's direction.  
  
Sydney was cradling the head of a man who looked familiar and tears, near hysterical tears, streamed down her face. Because Will wasn't used to walking in on carnage, it took a moment for him to realise that the man was bleeding and that as Sydney rocked him her mouth moved for the word, "Dad" but failed to find it.  
  
He loved Sydney Bristow. Oh God, he did.  
  
The thought was inappropriate, but maybe not. Yes, she would never love him like he wanted. But for her to love him like she wanted, there was a chance. It wasn't soul destroying to love a woman who didn't love you. It was soul destroying to have never loved a woman.  
  
Shakespeare, man. Fucking Shakespeare. Textbook case.  
  
Will Tippin knew he loved Sydney Bristow when he moved forward, when he moved towards her. He knew he loved her when a small smile, a contented smile crossed his face.  
  
"Will, please…"  
  
Will knew he loved Sydney Bristow because he'd do anything for her.  
  
"You! If you move another fucking inch I will have you dead. Do you understand? Do you understand?"  
  
Will knew he loved Sydney Bristow for one reason above all others.  
  
"This is no game. Sit down!! Sit down before I put you down!!"  
  
That reason was called Vaughn. His number was 555 8769.  
  
"Will!!"  
  
**  
  
[End of Part 3]  
  
I promised three parts, didn't I? Well, um, I lied. Part 4 will come out next Wednesday (because I'm indisposed Tuesday) and that -- all being well -- will be the final part. As usual, if it's not there -- barrage me with mail. Bishclone@ntlworld.com 


	4. Be Small Enough

1 American Triangle 4: Be Small Enough  
  
Thanks to Ash and Rach for their sterling beta work. Sorry this one is a little late…  
  
  
  
[Designated]  
  
His desk was empty.  
  
It was still occupied -- the keyboard with the sticky 'B' key, that coffee mug stain besides the mouse mat -- but it was empty.  
  
He moved the pictures he had, invited Janine, his assistant, to peel the stickers from the monitor, removed every semblance of himself from his office space.  
  
A very quiet, almost silent 'fuck you,' to mark his first day without her.  
  
*  
  
Weiss had a look in his eyes. It was a small look, pitying.  
  
The look said, "Get out of here."  
  
Vaughn would confront him, ask, "What are you looking at?"  
  
Weiss would shrug his shoulders, sigh. He took on the persona of a disappointed older brother. There were more creases in his forehead. Vaughn felt like the kid they caught smoking pot behind the bike sheds. That kid, the one with problems, the one who messed up, poor kid.  
  
Weiss's look said, "Poor Kid."  
  
But when Vaughn asked him what the problem was, he would always respond, "How about those Kings, huh?"  
  
It was the Hockey off-season.  
  
Weiss wasn't talking to him.  
  
*  
  
Alice called. She wanted to know how he was.  
  
He said he was fine.  
  
His mother said she was worried,  
  
He said he was fine.  
  
Weiss said he was resigning.  
  
Vaughn replied, monosyllabic, "fine."  
  
Devlin asked him how he was shaping up.  
  
'Fuck you,' he thought, but answered, "fine."  
  
His new assignment looked at him with cold, mid-fortyish eyes that had seen less hurt than Vaughn's.  
  
"You're a fuck, you know that?" the man had said.  
  
"Fine," Vaughn had replied.  
  
He only really meant it that last time.  
  
*  
  
One day, a week after he'd officially decided to become a cold-hearted son of a bitch, he'd received a phone call at home from a man who sounded angry.  
  
"Vaughn."  
  
"Yeah?"  
  
"You know a Sydney Bristow?"  
  
She was not dead, he'd seen to that. She should have been out of the country, he'd seen to that too. The ambulances had arrived quickly at the Dauphine fire, the agents at the cab-stand, the surveillance team working her house -- they were all his work.  
  
But he had not been able to save her. Not in the traditional sense.  
  
"No, I don't know a Sydney Bristow."  
  
"Yeah, well, she knows you. And something tells me that you should treat her better. So anyway, I could tell you where she is if you want to do the decent thing…"  
  
"She's in the country?"  
  
"Now you're just pissing me off. Henta, California, the "Buena Vista" hut right on the beach, signposted."  
  
"Thank you."  
  
"Yeah," the male sneered. "Thank me."  
  
The line went dead.  
  
Vaughn called his mother. He ended the conversation, "I love you," and she drew a breath sharply.  
  
"You be careful."  
  
"I love you," again, and a pause from his mother before a sigh.  
  
"My beautiful baby boy," in a weary tone, and then again, "My beautiful baby boy."  
  
**  
  
[Evolution]  
  
Will looked at Sydney and smiled. His eyes were lit. His skin had a warm, feverish glow.  
  
"Sit the fuck down."  
  
He turned slowly towards the man with the rifle. Nodded, took in his demeanour. "You okay?" Will asked, hands stuffed into his pockets. "Because I'm feeling a bit of aggression here."  
  
Sharply kicked in the gut Will fell, winded, and in crippling pain to the floor.  
  
The rifled men laughed in unison and Sydney suddenly felt very alone. She panicked a little, tried to regulate her breathing.  
  
Her father must have sensed her fear.  
  
His entire body began to shake. She wondered if he was having a fit, going into arrest, leaving her forever on a carpet that needed shampooing in a nowhere hole on the coast.  
  
But his shaking didn't look like cardiac arrest. The jitters were too well timed. It looked like shock.  
  
That was better.  
  
(Better in the sense that he was still dying. Familiar story: dead unless she could get him to a hospital. "It's a miracle you got him here in time, Miss Bristow." Miracle. Yeah.)  
  
No longer interested in Will, the rifled man turned to Sydney. "Stand up."  
  
Moving her father's head from her lap she slowly moved and complied.  
  
They motioned her over and she came. Subordinate and quiet.  
  
She could think of a thousand good speeches but each would fall flat. Instead, the truth felt right. "Are you going to execute me?"  
  
"Yes," with two brisk nods.  
  
She looked at her shoes, a soft, hand-stitched leather that was clean for once. She was wearing a floral dress without a gun holster strapped to her leg. Her hair was matted down with her own blood, hers and theirs. Her sun hat and beach novel were discarded on the floor to her right. There was something faintly ironic about the meeting of her two lives like this, the way they blended together rather than pulled apart.  
  
She steadied her nerve, looked the men in the eyes and said, "You don't hurt the civilian."  
  
Maybe, for once, the truth.  
  
*  
  
Vaughn looked at himself in the rear view mirror one last time and questioned the reflection that looked back at him.  
  
Better that the job be done…right, this time. Better that he grow some balls and face facts.  
  
Better that he realise his priorities.  
  
The house in Henta was picturesque. Exactly as she'd told him it would be.  
  
Some sand dunes, her father, a mysterious boy who was never addressed fully.  
  
But more than that, her smile, her life, the energy that came out from the telling of the story. The way she curled her fingers around the edges of her TV dinner. The way she'd gotten newsprint on her hands and then all over her nose, sticky against her cheeks.  
  
He knows he's in love with Sydney Bristow. But he doesn't know why.  
  
He clears his throat.  
  
Hopes she listened when he said, "Trust me," because that would make all of this easier  
  
Re-evaluates his priorities and gets out of the car.  
  
*  
  
"Military?" the taller rifled man asked.  
  
She nodded, and backed up against the wall.  
  
Her father's breathing stopped for a second and so does the room.  
  
She guessed this was because everyone is curious how this death would look. Bitter experience had taught her no two are ever the same.  
  
-- Both rifle men looked towards her father and waited, his chest remained still, Will - now standing - closed in on the farthest gunman, hovered almost.  
  
He looked at her and mouthed, "Now?"  
  
She stared back at him, impassive. All the same she wrapped her hand around a nearby broken table leg and hid it behind herself. --  
  
The apnea in her father subsided. He took a huge breath.  
  
Satisfied, all attention turned back toward her.  
  
That is, until the door clicked open and then clacked shut.  
  
Until Michael Vaughn entered a two-bedroom beach house in Henta and pointed his pistol -- his gun, not standard issue, privately bought -- at Sydney Bristow.  
  
Until Michael Vaughn cocked his head to the left -- an inquisitive look -- and said, "My mess."  
  
*  
  
[False Starts]  
  
Will was the first to react. Possessed by a strength she didn't believe he had, he made a run at Vaughn and was able to pull his legs from under him, pull him down and knock the weapon from his hand.  
  
Sydney was then given enough time to rush the execution squad and show them what it was like to be under thirty and still care.  
  
It was strangely clinical and there was very little sound.  
  
Will had retrieved the gun and had it to Vaughn's head by the time she'd bound the hands of the executioners -- they smelt too much of father's day soap products and fresh morning coffee to kill -- and checked on her father.  
  
It had all gone off without so much as a tiny hitch that she was immediately suspicious. She approached the floored Vaughn but resisted the urge to kick him in the stomach -- that was the preserve of low life criminal scum, not for the man who tore her up inside and made promises he could not keep, promises like "trust me" -- so she said, simply, "I can only not kill you once. You know that, right? I can only let you go once…"  
  
"And this is…?" he asked.  
  
"Twice," she nodded. "Twice."  
  
Will looked too comfortable with the gun in his hand, the sweaty fist wrapped around Vaughn's collar. "Help my Dad?" she asked him, bringing the situation back under her (debatable) control.  
  
Will nodded, handed the gun over and made three short steps towards her father before turning sharply, opening his mouth, "Syd…" and then shaking his head, grinning to himself, "…Actually, I don't want to know. It doesn't matter, no, really, and you have to believe me here, I don't want to know…"  
  
She didn't believe him.  
  
"But…" Will turned back again, "I'm thinking you don't work for a bank… right?"  
  
"Yes."  
  
Two arms raised in mock triumph and a "Knew it!" before attending to her father.  
  
She turned back to Vaughn, strangely inert in her ever slackening grasp, and asked, hoping for a straighter answer, "Why?"  
  
"I hadn't thought of everything."  
  
"What just happened now?"  
  
"Diversion."  
  
She shook her head. "You couldn't leave me alone?"  
  
Whispered, hidden amongst his breath, as though he didn't want others to hear, "No," and then those words again, those words that she hated…  
  
…he said, "Trust me."  
  
And she did.  
  
*  
  
[Bye]  
  
Vaughn's car was commandeered as an ambulance. Will its driver. Her father its only patient. She made him as comfortable as she could on its back seat. Wrapped him in a blanket that used to be her own. Kissed his forehead and watched his consciousness drift in and out.  
  
She lifted her makeshift sundress bandage to reveal his fleshy head wound -- fleshy, in this case, not usually good, fleshy meaning septicaemia and death by blood loss -- and pulled the tourniquet tighter on his left leg.  
  
He asked her, "Neh-what-how?" three times before she summoned up the courage to lie, "Everything's going to be okay."  
  
She couldn't validate that. She couldn't back it up.  
  
She promised to come get him as soon as possible. She couldn't be sure that was true either.  
  
She knew one thing: he would not die like her. There would be some dignity here, if that was all she could manage. As she urged Will to drive safely as he left her alone with a man who may or may not be her ally -- lover? -- she held back the bile in the her throat.  
  
She had to try this. She had to make this work. If she didn't, nothing would ever be 'fine' again, there would be no patience for her fear, she'd die uselessly in an accident of some kind, wondering always.  
  
If she did not face this -- face him -- and end this, there would never be any rest.  
  
More than anything, there had to be rest.  
  
She kissed Will softly before she sent him on his way. She said goodbye to that life, to that man who would have protected her if she could have been protected.  
  
She turned to Vaughn on the sandy ground, in the humid darkness and told him, the brake lights from his car lighting her face, "You could kill me now."  
  
He nodded. "I could."  
  
She smiled back, inviting him to fight for her life.  
  
She was done.  
  
*  
  
[Reclamation]  
  
There had been a lot of silence. Maybe twenty minutes worth. They had spent some time staring, and some time asking pointless questions that served only to disrupt the air.  
  
It took twenty minutes to hit on the big one.  
  
"How can I trust you?"  
  
"I'm here."  
  
"Is that all?"  
  
"No, there's more…"  
  
Pause.  
  
She gave the silence a second to breathe and then, "What? I have to trust you? That if you're here you're apologising for the shit you pulled on the ice and you must be okay? That you came to save me, is that it? Am I being rescued here?"  
  
Pause.  
  
She took three steps over to him, established a striking distance. "Is that what you mean? Is it?"  
  
He shrugged. Not because he meant to, not because it was appropriate, but because it wasn't hostile.  
  
He couldn't seem like a threat to her. Too much of that, for too long.  
  
"How about fuck you?" she spat. "How about that?"  
  
"How about I love you?" Fuck. He looked for strength somewhere, tried the beach and found empty ground, tried her eyes and found the impetus to take new breath, "Yeah. That. How about that?"  
  
She crossed her arms, unimpressed, but the hold she had on her composure was slight. "How about you nearly got me killed?"  
  
"How about I told you to trust me?"  
  
"How about I tried?"  
  
"How about -- " pause, because it hurt to think, and the darkness strained his heavy eyes "--how about I'm sorry?"  
  
She shook her head, her pale face stained by sickly moonlight and passionate indignation. "How about…" she looked to him, looked for his eyes, looked for recognition, tried to find something and then, "…forget it." She turned her back. "Go home." She began to walk away.  
  
No.  
  
"No …" pleading, and not at all attractive, but beyond notions of proper communication, plunging into desperation, "…I did what I thought was best."  
  
"I know." Another four steps away.  
  
Almost gone.  
  
"But…I love you." Again. Inconclusive. Tell her why, Vaughn. Tell her the truth.  
  
Finally, she turned, regarded him with all she had left, every shred of common decency. "I know." She took a step forward -- progress -- to match the three or four he'd used to follow her. "I know so well I stayed in the country. I waited for you. I trusted you. I…loved you. I shouldn't have done any of that."  
  
"Why?"  
  
"Because it's killing us both." Two steps forward, followed by a pause -- this one warmer than the rest -- "And it's killing everything around us."  
  
His patience waned. "I tried, Sydney, I did. I tried…"  
  
Maybe it was the tone of his voice, because she lunged quickly at him, more than that, accurately.  
  
"Don't you think I tried? Don't you think I spent every single day trying…" She swung out, but the punch never connected. He moved his body to absorb her anger and pull her close.  
  
Pause, again. Or rather, stall.  
  
He tried to think of words good enough. Better than 'I love you,' and 'I never want to lose you.' Better than the crap they wrote on greetings cards. Something concrete. Something she would understand.  
  
Pause.  
  
"You kiss me, I swear, I'll kill you," she threatened, weakly, edged ever closer to feverish tears.  
  
It was the very definition of 'Too much.' Pain, weary and the hope of a happy ending had her collapse within his arms. Repression, desire and familiarity led her breathing pattern to mimic his for support.  
  
All of it led to the hate, as much a part of her as her eyes, telling her it was 'sorry' and 'wanted to go home now.' Led to resentment evaporating and leaving only empty gratitude.  
  
Thankful that he was here, now, and he wasn't dead.  
  
Not nearly everything, not nearly enough. But an end, at least.  
  
He lifted her head a little and looked her in the eyes. "It's okay," he lied, convincingly.  
  
It's okay.  
  
They kissed awkwardly. Not in the sense that meeting an ex-girlfriend was awkward. Not in the sense that taking tea with an ancient aunt was awkward. Awkward in the way that it was too real, too emotional, too dense for people trying to cling onto everything about themselves that they imagined was true.  
  
She: strong, independent, moral, unforgiving. He: stoic, loyal, bitter, cold.  
  
They were not those people, and the way they kissed each other -- warmth on warmth, yes on yes, compliance on acceptance -- confirmed that. Clutching each other like they were dying, like they were holding onto the last remnants of breath became slowly the only truth there ever had been.  
  
Pause: She wondered if she was weak. He wondered if he was sorry.  
  
He looked down at her, searched for the other truth he knew and made a grab for it, "Sydney, I've arranged something…"  
  
  
  
*  
  
[Triangle]  
  
Will had only just pulled up and disembarked when he caught sight of them.  
  
He'd left the hospital to save her. He'd driven like a crazy man after admitting her father in record speed (doctors were much quicker on their feet, he found, when you looked really sick.) Her father -- Jack -- would be safe for now. Will's real concern was for Sydney. He'd come back to drive her anywhere she wanted to go, to be her Knight in shining armour. Except, from what he could see, she'd already found one.  
  
They weren't touching but they had the residue of people who had been close. Their bodies turned towards each other, palms upward, shoulders relaxed, posture that subconsciously said 'Come here.'  
  
This was Vaughn.  
  
He was going to say something, call out to them when he saw Vaughn hand something to Sydney. That something killed the words in his throat.  
  
Though Will was an amateur -- what was the word? -- a rookie, it was definitely an automatic handgun Vaughn handed Sydney. Sleek, and black and looking almost too heavy for her slight, finely boned hands. He tried to hide his astonishment when she flicked the safety and loaded a round of ammunition like she'd been packing heat since the cradle.  
  
Considering her father's situation, maybe she had.  
  
What was annoying him most, what really hit him low, beneath his loose leather belt, was the strange, silent perfection of it all.  
  
There she was, with another man, dignity intact when she should have been in tears, handling a weapon carefully. Her mouth had taken on that strange pout it had when she was thinking. In his mind's eye, the hands covered in scratches were porcelain in their perfection, the hair matted and sticky with her father's blood flowed back from her face, dancing on the wind.  
  
The writer in him wanted to watch some more. The writer in him saw Vaughn copy her actions, watch the way he prepped his weapon, the way he bowed his head towards her and touched her forearm lightly with his fingers, which must have been the universal language for, "You okay?"  
  
From his vantage point Will saw Sydney nod, tense her body and take a tentative step forward before swinging back.  
  
Suddenly she was angry but Will didn't know why. He was too far away from her to hear. He'd like to think the words were, "Why? I hate you. No. Not now! Please. God!" but the glistening in her eyes (maybe imagined too, though he thought not) made them more likely to be, "There has to be another way. But…I know. Oh God, I'm scared."  
  
Scared? Maybe not. But it worked in the cold and the dark, it worked for Will.  
  
There was a calming period. Vaughn's hand cupped Sydney's chin, small words (single syllables) were said that even Will couldn't think to interpret. They must have been good though -- from this Vaughn, he expected nothing less -- because Will's would have been good enough.  
  
Sydney began moving away and it was then that Will heard it. The cackle of gun fire that made his knees buckle and his stomach sink. Continuous rounds that dropped him to the floor with the sheer force of it all. From behind them, from in front of them, from all around them, the loudest, most violent gunfire.  
  
The plains of sand, the dark of night allowed him only a dim view of what happened next.  
  
It was enough.  
  
*  
  
[Vaughn]  
  
There was a time when he thought he was immortal.  
  
"Michael, stop climbing the tree! Michael, look both ways! Michael, I love you! Michael, you can't play injured! Michael…come here, come here."  
  
He gave Sydney a look. His look. The "I love you," look.  
  
Heard the call, his mother's voice strained on an imagined wind. A pain in her throat, choking her words, a trembling cigarette in her left hand. "Come back, Michael…please, come back."  
  
He raised his weapon.  
  
"It's so dark..."  
  
Prayed -- please God -- and stepped forward.  
  
*  
  
[Will]  
  
Vaughn and Sydney? They fired back. They -- or maybe just Sydney -- shouted and screamed. Will considered getting up and helping them fight the invisible force -- with what? -- but found himself too heavy to move.  
  
Silence followed. Silence and a re-evaluation of a cowardly fear.  
  
He stood, stumbled forward in the half darkness (his fear making him count his steps) and felt the sand loosen and shift beneath him. The sound was gone, the other gunfire was gone, the air was still again, unbroken. You could have argued that nothing had happened there.  
  
Nothing, but this.  
  
*  
  
A million memories felt like a million snaps of bone, shattered and done.  
  
Sydney Bristow on the track team. Tall, elegant, regal, athletic,  
  
"Talent," from the other journalism major to you.  
  
"Yes," your assessment.  
  
Sydney Bristow at a frat party in the half darkness. "Hi" she says. "Hey," you reply.  
  
That day she caught you stealing milk from the local grocery store. "Put it back," says she. "Do you want me to starve?" you ask, "I'm a struggling student…"  
  
She buys the milk and walks you home.  
  
She's crying and she cries with you. You're crying and you're not quite sure why. "Thanks," she sniffs, and you nod like you helped. You do this with a reasonable frequency but always she leaves before dawn. You ask her to stay -- every time -- and she declines.  
  
Meeting Danny. Spitting on your hand before you shake his and acting, suddenly, like you're the kooky goofball guy all over again. Shaking and she clutches your arm, says, "Don't be nervous." But you're not nervous. You're angry.  
  
Kissing her softly, carefully, and wishing -- hoping -- and asking. "What does this mean?"  
  
Watching her fall, and fall again, and not know what's tripping her up.  
  
You'd kill anything that hurt her, you'd always said.  
  
But she's beyond your reach.  
  
Sydney Bristow -- words, always words.  
  
Now she's quiet.  
  
*  
  
[Wrist]  
  
He wasn't shocked when he saw her. It surely wasn't new to see her bleeding. New to see her fingers curled oddly, awkwardly. New to see the curve of her body as she lay prone, the protection of her stomach that she affected while she was sleeping.  
  
It was new to see her still. Unbreathing. Him just beside her, his hand clasped around her wrist as if he were leading her somewhere. Blood staining his lips, like hers.  
  
Dead, both of them. Bullets riddling their bodies startlingly neatly, very little abuse to their bodies, something that said lain more than fallen.  
  
Will assumed he should cry, instead he scratched his head.  
  
He thought maybe he should shout, or it should rain, that a ten piece orchestra should strike a chord.  
  
There should have been pain instead there was suspicion. "Sydney?"  
  
Or maybe denial.  
  
"Sydney?"  
  
Like a blow to the stomach: loss. The realisation that she would not get up like being hit by a ten tonne truck.  
  
"Syd?"  
  
Nothing.  
  
"Come on…"  
  
Admonishing her like she was late for something. Bending down and shaking her like this was some heavy sleep.  
  
"Come on now," whispering because that felt right.  
  
"Syd," begging because that worked too.  
  
The gunfire from the distance was oddly predictable at first, until he realised it had to be meant for him.  
  
He wished he were noble enough to die beside her -- but some other guy had got there first.  
  
So he ran. And he ran. Ran some more.  
  
He thinks, somehow, she would have approved.  
  
*  
  
The last thing Sydney Bristow said was, "I'm sorry."  
  
A 'sorry' that Will never heard.  
  
*  
  
[End Part 4]  
  
You think I'd leave you here? There's still much to explain and an epilogue needed to do it in. On past experience I can make no guarantees on when you'll see that, but I'm really hoping to have this story finally finished by the end of the week. 


	5. Epilogue

American Triangle 5 : Epilogue  
  
[The First Ending]  
  
He's on the phone. "Yeah. I heard just the other week the clerk at the video store saying he'd seen her. But then I still see her. I still see her everywhere."  
  
The voice on the other end is sympathetic. If anyone were to suddenly come upon Will, alone save the empty boxes in Sydney's old apartment, he would tell them the person on the other end was his mother. That would be a lie. Yet his twice weekly calls to the Los Angeles therapy line are a habit he'd rather keep to himself, if-it's-all-the-same-to-you.  
  
"I mean, I sit here sorting her stuff into boxes and it's all so regular, so boring. You wouldn't have guessed there was anything out of the ordinary about her."  
  
Will wasn't too cheap to get proper therapy, but too embarrassed. It was easier to lie down a phone line.  
  
"I still don't know…There are still so many times when I expect her to come through the door…"  
  
More than that, days and nights and weeks when he just knows she'll come through that door. Knows she will because owes it to him. Because she's never let him down before.  
  
"…And I keep thinking, I should move on. Francie -- her other friend, Francie -- she says, she says…"  
  
Will practices what he has to say to Francie. Subdues his paranoia, his -- what? -- his beliefs. Makes it out like he's sorry she's dead, like there's so much tragedy, like he's crushed by the pain, when he doesn't feel that way at all.  
  
Whhen he refuses to believe his own eyes.  
  
"I can't sleep…"  
  
He sleeps too well, too deeply.  
  
"Eating -- you know -- is hard…"  
  
There's a plate of pizza to his left.  
  
"I keep --"  
  
The voice on the other end cuts him off. "Will, it seems to me that you're not addressing the real problems here. You're fuelling your life on denial. You need to accept that Sydney's dead and -- like you just said -- you should move on."  
  
The first three weeks after Sydney died Will wrote a book. Four hundred pages, an extended novella, researched and brutally edited. It's the half imagined, half real tale of a young woman caught in a circle of spies. It's pretty much as he remembers it, except each time she survives. He's rewritten the ending, but she still survives.  
  
There are publishers interested, really interested.  
  
"Yes, I should move on."  
  
It's easier to lie down the phone line. It's easier to pretend there that she isn't dead.  
  
It's easier to publish this book thinking of her reading it somewhere, over coffee, laughing at how inaccurate he's been.  
  
It's easier to live that way.  
  
**  
  
[The Second Ending.]  
  
For a long time the world thought Jack Bristow was dead. More than dead, DOA, fatally wounded, disappeared, alone. It appeared the world didn't know Jack Bristow as well as it thought.  
  
There was a lot to be said for retirement. For Malibu beaches and sun drenched condos. He visited London twice a year to keep up on things but other than that his life was carefree and relaxed. His life was ending.  
  
Sometimes, he had wild notions of a daughter he once knew and a wife who once betrayed him. He would ask the nurses and they would tutt something about a "brilliant mind and a debilitating disease." He wonders what happened to them, his family.  
  
He remembered the daughter had been engaged to a man who didn't suit her. Then the man had died and Jack had stood with her alongside his grave. He remembers a man after that with sharper features and better suits. Another man with messy hair and journalistic pretensions. His daughter had been caught in the middle, all right. He remembers that he thought this was funny, but that he never shared his laughter with anyone. He wonders why he remembers being so grumpy.  
  
He has no pictures of his daughter. Nothing to adorn his wall like the other residents. He has his memories though, and his imagination. In his mind's eye, his daughter sits on a sandy dune, staring at the sea when she's fourteen years old and nowhere near a woman. She cries because he's said they have to go home and because he's pretended for her whole life that he doesn't care about her. He knows he did this to make it easier for her, when his inevitable (and possibly early) death came he had hoped -- then -- that she would not even cry for him. He wanted to save her the pain. This he remembers clearly and he still supports his intentions.  
  
In the dreams he has, he calls her name but she doesn't reply.  
  
"Hey, Daddy…"  
  
She only replies, you see, when she comes to visit.  
  
**  
  
[The Third Ending]  
  
So Girl and Boy finally made that sunset big enough to walk into.  
  
{Crying when they were picked up by Vaughn's 'friend.' Crying when they gave her a new social security number and told her she was 'Stacey.' Crying and crying because it didn't matter how many times she cried as Stacey Luckman, occupant of 82 Rheinstrasse. Crying, then, because it was liberating.)  
  
Girl and Boy say, 'I do.'  
  
{He took a book about the KGB to the ski lodge in the Alps. He couldn't ski and he wouldn't learn. There was no skating anymore, either. He had burned the shirt she bought him.)  
  
Girl and boy find normality.  
  
{Often it didn't suit them.}  
  
Girl and boy smile.  
  
(forced, over parent-teacher barbeques, real, those mornings on the balcony, when nobody could touch them)  
  
They were together.  
  
(yes)  
  
They were in love.  
  
(yes)  
  
The end…  
  
(… kept them together.)  
  
Sometimes, they wondered.  
  
Notes:  
  
Thank you for reading this. I know it hasn't always been easy, but thank you. A special shout out to Rach (for writing fabulous stories I envy, for giving me encouragement when I needed it, for understanding an awful lot) and to Ash (for excellent betas, informative e-mails, and a better grasp of Americana than I could hope for.) If you have any questions -- pertaining to me writing I story I thought out to the extent that I often forgot the basics -- then hit me with mail here: Bishclone@ntlworld.com If it involves the plot then I will know the answer. 


End file.
